Rebecca Seguin-Fowler 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.