Dr. Samantha L. Huey, PhD is a Research Associate in the Joan Klein Jacobs Center for Precision Nutrition and Health 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 term 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.
Selected Publications:
Huey SL*, Mehta NH*, Kuriyan R, Peña-Rosas JP, Finkelstein JL, Kashyap S, et al. Potential Mechanisms of Precision Nutrition-Based Interventions for Managing Obesity. Adv Nutr. 2024 Mar;15(3):100186. DOI: 10.1016/j.advnut.2024.100186
Huey SL, Koniecynszki EM, Mehta NH, Krisher JT, Bhargava A, Friesen VM, Mbuya MNN, Monterrosa EC, Nyangaresi AM, Mehta S. A systematic review of the impacts of post-harvest handling on provitamin A, iron and zinc retention in seven biofortified crops. Nature Food 2023; 4;978–985. DOI: 10.1038/s43016-023-00874-y. PMID: 37945785. PMC10661739.
Huey SL, Bhargava A, Friesen VM, Koniecynszki EM, Krisher JT, Mbuya MNN, Mehta NH, Monterrosa E, Nyangaresi AM, Mehta S. Sensory acceptability of biofortified foods and food products: a systematic review. Nutrition Reviews. 2023;, nuad100. doi: 10.1093/nutrit/nuad100. PMID: 37634146
Huey SL, Mehta NH, Konieczynski EM, Bhargava A, Friesen VM, Krisher JT, Mbuya MNN, Monterrosa E, Nyangaresi AM, Boy E, Mehta S. Bioaccessibility and bioavailability of biofortified food and food products: Current evidence. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr. 2022 Nov 17:1-23. doi: 10.1080/10408398.2022.2142762. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36384354
Huey SL, Krisher JT, Morgan D, Mkambula P, Gannon BM, Mbuya MNN, Mehta S. A review of portable quantitative and semi-quantitative devices for measurement of vitamin A in biological samples. Curr Res Biotechnol. 2022 May 12;4:253-274. doi: 10.1016/j.crbiot.2022.04.003. PMID: 36033130; PMCID: PMC9407042
Huey SL, Krisher JT, Morgan D, Mkambula P, Srinivasan B, Gannon BM, Mbuya MNN, Mehta S. Portable devices for measurement of vitamin A concentrations in edible oil: field readiness of available options. ACS Omega. 2022 May 17;7(21):17502-17518. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.1c07181. PMID: 35664625; PMCID: PMC9161250
Huey SL, Krisher JT, Bhargava A, Friesen VM, Konieczynski EM, Mbuya MNN, Mehta NH, Monterrosa E, Nyangaresi AM, Mehta S. Review of the impact pathways of biofortified foods and food products. Nutrients. 2022 Mar 12;14(6):1200. doi: 10.3390/nu14061200. PMID: 35334857; PMCID: PMC8952206
Mehta S, Huey SL, Ghugre PS, Potdar RD, Venkatramanan S, Krisher JT, Ruth CJ, Chopra HV, Thorat A, Thakkar V, Johnson L, Powis L, Raveendran Y, Haas JD, Finkelstein JL, Udipi SA. A randomized trial of iron- and zinc-biofortified pearl millet-based complementary feeding in children aged 12 to 18 months living in urban slums. Clinical Nutrition 2022, 41;4:937-947. PMID: 35299084, DOI: 10.1016/j.clnu.2022.02.014
Huey SL*, Yu EA*, Finkelstein JL, Glesby MJ, Bonam W, Russell DG, Mehta S. Nutrition, inflammation, and the gut microbiota among outpatients with active tuberculosis disease in India. Am J Trop Med Hyg. 2021 Oct 18;105(6):1645-1656. doi: 10.4269/ajtmh.21-0310. PMID: 34662867; PMCID: PMC8641345
Guetterman HM, Huey SL, Knight R, Fox AM, Mehta S, Finkelstein JL. Vitamin B-12 and the gastrointestinal microbiome: a systematic review. Adv Nutr. 2021 Oct 6;13(2):530–58. doi: 10.1093/advances/nmab123. PMID: 34612492; PMCID: PMC8970816
Mehta S, Huey SL, McDonald D, Knight R, Finkelstein JL. Nutritional interventions and the gut microbiome in children. Annu Rev Nutr. 2021 Oct 11;41:479-510. doi: 10.1146/annurev-nutr-021020-025755. Epub 2021 Jul 20. PMID: 34283919
Huey SL, Acharya N, Silver A, Sheni R, Yu EA, Peña-Rosas JP, Mehta S. Effects of oral vitamin D supplementation on linear growth and other health outcomes among children under five years of age. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2020 Dec 8;12(12):CD012875. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD012875.pub2. PMID: 33305842; PMCID: PMC8121044
Huey SL, Jiang L, Fedarko MW, McDonald D, Martino C, Ali F, Russell DG, Udipi SA, Thorat A, Thakker V, Ghugre P, Potdar RD, Chopra H, Rajagopalan K, Haas JD, Finkelstein JL, Knight R, Mehta S. Nutrition and the gut microbiota in 10- to 18-month-old children living in urban slums of Mumbai, India. mSphere. 2020 Sep 23;5(5):e00731-20. doi: 10.1128/mSphere.00731-20. PMID: 32968008; PMCID: PMC7568645
Huey SL*, Ruth CJ*, Krisher JT, Fothergill A, Gannon BM, Jones CE, Centeno-Tablante E, Hackl LS, Colt S, Finkelstein JL, Mehta S. An electronic data capture framework (ConnEDCt) for global and public health research: design and implementation. J Med Internet Res. 2020 Aug 13;22(8):e18580. doi: 10.2196/18580. PMID: 32788154; PMCID: PMC7453324
Huey SL, Finkelstein JL, Venkatramanan S, Udipi SA, Ghugre P, Thakker V, Thorat A, Potdar RD, Chopra HV, Kurpad AV, Haas JD, Mehta S. Prevalence and correlates of undernutrition in young children living in urban slums of Mumbai, India: A Cross Sectional Study. Front Public Health. 2019 Jul 12;7:191. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2019.00191. PMID: 31355176; PMCID: PMC6639755
Huey SL, Venkatramanan S, Udipi SA, Finkelstein JL, Ghugre P, Haas JD, Thakker V, Thorat A, Salvi A, Kurpad AV, Mehta S. Acceptability of iron- and zinc-biofortified pearl millet (Dhanashakti)-based [corrected] complementary foods among children in an urban slum of Mumbai, India. Front Nutr. 2017 Aug 25;4:39. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2017.00039. Erratum in: Front Nutr. 2018 Oct 18;5:92. PMID: 28971097; PMCID: PMC5609630