Research Activities

She aspires to provide nutritious food to every malnourished child; he wants to do so as efficiently as possible. Together, they and their UC Davis team and in-country collaborators have won global recognition for their proposals to help boost Haiti out of poverty. Agricultural economist Stephen Vosti, nutritionist Reina Engle-Stone and their colleagues weighed the benefits and costs of five nutrition-focused interventions to address the dismal conditions in the tiny Caribbean nation, hampered by ineffective development policies and buffeted by devastating hurricanes that have hindered recovery from an even more deadly 2010 earthquake.

Reina Engle-Stone was halfway through her biology degree at Cornell University when she discovered global nutrition. Her introduction was a nutritional epidemiology class, and almost immediately she was hooked. “You could take biology and apply it to other things. I thought, this is great, this is what I want to do,” she says.

For all the moms who obediently popped their prenatal vitamins during pregnancy while wondering if the supplements could actually benefit their babies, an international research group has the answer, and it’s a resounding “yes.”

Since 2008, Kathryn Dewey has coordinated a massive, international research effort called the “iLiNS”, or International Lipid-Based Nutrient Supplements Project. The project focuses on formulating and evaluating cost-effective, lipid-based supplements — much like peanut butter — that have shown promise for improving nutrition for children and women in impoverished nations. Recent results indicate that fortified, lipid- or fat-based nutritional supplements provided during pregnancy to women in Bangladesh reduced stunting, abnormally low weight and small head size in babies born to these women.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, will join in an international research effort to develop new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent malnutrition in infants and children around the world.

Images of mud huts, lush jungle growth and rust-colored soil flash across Steve Vosti’s computer screen as the UC Davis economist scans photos of some of his research sites.