Institute Leadership
G. Cliff Lamb, Ph.D.
Interim Director of the IHA
G. Cliff Lamb, Ph.D., is the interim director of the Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture (IHA) at Texas A&M University. The IHA is the world’s first research institute to bring together precision nutrition, responsive agriculture, and behavioral research to reduce diet-related chronic disease in a way that considers environmental and economic effects. Supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture – Agriculture Research Service (USDA-ARS) and the state of Texas, the IHA has an annual budget of more than $30 million and includes an embedded USDA-ARS unit.
Regan Bailey, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.D.
IHA Associate Director, Precision Nutrition
Regan Bailey is Associate Director for the Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture and professor of nutrition at Texas A&M University. She previously served as a professor of nutrition science at Purdue University, and as a nutritional epidemiologist and director of career development at the National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements.
She is a registered dietitian who completed a dietetic internship and has a master’s degree in food and nutrition from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She received her doctorate in nutrition science from Pennsylvania State University. She completed a master’s of public health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.
Her research focuses on improving the methods of measuring nutritional status to optimize health. She utilizes nationally representative survey data to characterize the American dietary landscape, to identify the optimal methods for assessment of biomarkers of nutritional status to understand how dietary intakes relate to health outcomes. She developed the first models combining nutrients from foods and dietary supplements to estimate total usual intake. Her work was used to inform the calcium and vitamin D Dietary Reference Intakes, and the National Academy reference values. She has used these models to identify differences in nutritional exposures by gender, race, ethnicity, life stage, and income, suggesting the need for population-specific, interventions and public health policy. She is the author of more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications.
She served on the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and as chair of the Data Analysis and Food Pattern Modeling Subcommittee. She was a member of the 2021 Committee on Scanning for New Evidence on Riboflavin to Support a Dietary Reference Intake Review for the National Academy of Medicine. She recently was appointed to serve on the American Heart Association’s Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health Nutrition Committee.
Marco Palma, Ph.D.
IHA Interim Associate Director, Responsive Agriculture
Marco Palma, Ph.D., is interim associate director for Responsive Agriculture at the Texas A&M AgriLife Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture. IHA’s Responsive Agriculture work fosters innovation in agriculture and the food environment to ensure a system that is economically prosperous while providing safe, nutritious and abundant food to promote health and well-being. The Responsive Agriculture hub is dedicated to engaging in translational research that bridges the gap between emerging technologies, innovative practical solutions and behavioral adoption by farmers and consumers. Under Palma’s leadership, the aim is to partner with stakeholders to develop a Responsive Agricultural sector that becomes adaptable, resilient and economically prosperous and increases nutrition security and health.
Palma is a leading agricultural economist and brings over 18 years of expertise cultivated over his career at Texas A&M University in research, teaching and Extension. He has served in professional leadership positions including president of the Southern Agricultural Economics Association and the editorial board of leading journals in the field, including the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. Palma is a Texas A&M Presidential Impact Fellow, a Texas A&M AgriLife Research Faculty Fellow and Leader of Research for the Department of Agricultural Economics. Additionally, he was a participant in the first cohort of LEAD AgriLife.
Since 2017, Palma has served as co-founding director of the Human Behavior Laboratory at Texas A&M University. The lab is one of the largest facilities in the world dedicated to studying the neurophysiology of human choices with a focus on food and agriculture to better understand, predict and change behavior that improves people’s health and well-being. During his time as director, Palma has led the transdisciplinary faculty and integrated state-of-the-art technology to measure neurophysiological responses of human decision-making.
Dr. Palma first came to AgriLife as an assistant professor and Extension economist in 2006. Dr. Palma’s research investigates the driving forces influencing human decisions. His research has been particularly significant for evaluating existing and emerging technologies and the impact of government, farm and food policy on the production and consumption of food and agricultural products.
Palma began his academic career as an Extension economist specializing in horticulture marketing and economics. He is passionate about helping farmers and consumers create healthy, sustainable relationships and has secured more than $100 million in funding as PI or Co-PI to conduct applied research and outreach efforts, with 114 peer-reviewed publications in many top agricultural and applied economics journals. He has served on the committee of more than 100 graduate students, many of whom have placed in prestigious academic institutions, industry and government. Palma holds a doctorate in food and resource economics from the University of Florida.
Rebecca Seguin-Fowler, Ph.D., R.D.N., L.D., C.S.C.S.
IHA Associate Director, Healthy Living
Rebecca Seguin-Fowler, Ph.D., R.D.N., L.D., C.S.C.S., is Associate Director for the Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture at Texas A&M University. As a public health scientist with expertise in community-based nutrition and physical activity intervention research, she provides leadership for the organization’s social and behavioral intervention research initiatives via the Healthy Living program. She is also chief scientific officer for the Healthy Texas Institute, professor in the Department of Nutrition in the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, and graduate faculty in the Department of Health Promotion and Community Health Sciences at the School of Public Health.
Improving community health for underserved and underrepresented populations has been at the core of her work for more than two decades. She has led widely disseminated dietary and physical activity interventions, innovative food systems intervention projects, and a variety of adapted evidence-based programs for at-risk populations. Her current research focuses on understanding how people’s social, food and physical activity environments influence behavior change and maintenance—particularly in at-risk populations and settings, such as low-income families and rural communities.
Her programs have reached nearly every state in the U.S., as well as several other countries, helping hundreds of thousands of individuals improve their health and providing critical skill-building and support to a vast range of health educators working to serve their local communities.
She has secured more than $15 million in competitive funding to support her research with funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She has received numerous awards throughout her career including the Mead Johnson Award from the American Society for Nutrition, an Excellence Award from the Society of Behavioral Medicine Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions, and a Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. She has published more than 115 peer-reviewed articles and is frequently asked to speak to national and international audiences about her scientific findings as well as her community-engagement research and multisector partnerships.
A registered dietician, she received her bachelor’s degree in clinical exercise physiology from Boston University and a master’s degree in nutrition communication and a doctorate in food policy and applied nutrition from Tufts University in Boston.
Cathy Ross, Ph.D.
Maternal/Child Cohort Study Scientific Project Director
Catharine Ross received her undergraduate education at the University of California at Davis (zoology), and masters in nutrition and Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and postdoctoral training in the Department of Medicine, Columbia University. She is currently Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Texas A&M University in College Station, TX, having retired as Professor Emerita of Nutritional Sciences and Physiology, and occupant (emerita) of the Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair from the Department of Nutritional Sciences, Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Ross has conducted research on vitamin A nutrition and metabolism and on nutrition and immune function for four decades. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Nutrition and as Sr. Editor for Modern Nutrition in Health and Disease (11 ed). She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society for Nutrition, member of the National Academy of Science (USA), and has served on the Food Advisory Committee of the FDA, Food and Nutrition Board of NASEM, and Board of Scientific Counselors for NIH NIDDK.