Meet the Faculty: Reina Engle-Stone
Dr. Reina Engle-Stone is an Associate Professor in the Department of Nutrition and a faculty member of the Institute for Global Nutrition at UC Davis. She currently serves as Chair of the Designated Emphasis in Global Nutrition. Her research focuses on improving dietary adequacy and nutritional status among women and young children in low-resource settings, with particular emphasis on micronutrients, maternal and child nutrition, dietary assessment and modeling, and the role of diet in addressing multiple forms of malnutrition. She conducts applied, policy-relevant research and has served on numerous technical advisory groups related to micronutrients and large-scale food fortification.
Originally from Arkansas, Dr. Engle-Stone earned her undergraduate degree in biology at Cornell University, where she developed strong interests in nutrition science, epidemiology, and public health. Her early training included laboratory research using in vitro models as well as community-based work as a nutrition educator through the AmeriCorps program. She pursued doctoral training at UC Davis to combine a foundation in biochemistry with population-based and epidemiological methods, with the goal of conducting impactful research to inform nutrition policy and programs. As a faculty member, she continues to embrace this “cells to communities” approach in her research and teaching.
Food fortification has been a central theme of Dr. Engle-Stone’s work since her dissertation research, which was based on a national nutrition survey in Cameroon. Since then, she has collaborated with partners in multiple countries to improve the design, implementation, and evaluation of industrial food fortification programs, including assessment of both potential benefits and risks, and how fortification complements other nutrition interventions. Her work with the MINIMOD project focused on development and application of methods for dietary intake analysis and modeling, and collaboration with economists to estimate the cost-effectiveness of micronutrient intervention strategies. Her recent work examines the role of diet quality in addressing the double burden of malnutrition across the life course and includes assessment of the health impacts of non-staple food fortification in the United States, and the CoMIT project, which integrates a randomized control trial and modeling approaches to evaluate fortification of bouillon cubes in West Africa.
Dr. Engle-Stone lives in Davis, where she is a fair-weather bike commuter. Outside of work she enjoys exploring beautiful northern California, activities with her two young children, and recharging with runs through the surrounding fields and greenbelts.