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.