Samantha Huey

Dr. Samantha L. Huey, PhD is a Research Associate in the Center for Precision Health and Nutrition at Cornell University. Previously, Dr. Huey served as the 2022-2023 NIH T32 Maternal and Child Nutrition Postdoctoral Fellow and also as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Division of Nutritional Sciences. Dr. Huey earned her B.S. in Biology with minors in Nutrition & Global Diseases from Cedar Crest College (Allentown, PA) in 2013. She earned her PhD in Nutritional Sciences from Cornell University in 2020, concentrating in International Nutrition with minors in Epidemiology and Immunology & Infectious Diseases (dissertation chair: Dr. Saurabh Mehta).

Dr. Huey’s research interests include examining the connections between nutrition, the gut microbiota and immune function in maternal and child health and in particular how precision nutrition may apply in this context. She is investigating these questions in children and mothers who participated in two randomized controlled trials in Mumbai and South India, both of which examined the efficacy of consuming biofortified crops-based foods on growth, immunity, and cognition.

During her PhD training, she lived for two years in Mumbai to facilitate the first trial—which involved a complex study design, 20 urban slum community field sites, and managing hundreds of personnel and staff (ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02233764). She conducted an acceptability study before the parent trial was launched. Her dissertation work on nutrition status and the gut microbiome in the children participating in the Mumbai trial has been published in both nutrition and microbiology journals.

Dr. Huey’s current research questions include determining the impact of biofortified crops on the gut microbiome and whether the gut microbiome may predict longer team health outcomes; of particular interest is elucidating inter-individual differences in response to a given intervention. Dr. Huey also supports the NIH Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH) Initiative as part of the Data & Analytics Team for the Research Coordinating Center (RCC), co-led by Cornell (Co-MPI: Dr. Saurabh Mehta) and RTI International (Co-MPI: Dr. Marie Gantz).

Finally, Dr. Huey leads efforts to synthesize evidence on vitamin D supplementation, biofortification; obesity, precision nutrition, vitamin A at the point of care, diagnostic test accuracy, the gut microbiome, and maternal and child health to enable translation to action and contribute to guidelines such as for the World Health Organization.