About Gina S. Siapco, DrPH

A graduate of the doctoral program at LLU School of Public Health Center for Nutrition, Healthy Lifestyles and Disease Prevention (CNHLDP), Dr. Gina Segovia-Siapco is currently serving as associate professor in the field of nutrition/nutritional epidemiology. She is originally from the Philippines and first came to LLU in 2000 for her doctoral studies. She went back to the Philippines upon graduation in 2004 to resume her teaching responsibilities at the Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies as facultty and chair of the Public Health Department. She came back to serve at LLU in 2009. 

Dr. Siapco was involved in research projects during her doctoral studies which allowed her to focus on dietary assessment methods and developing and validating food frequency questionnaires and investigations on diet-disease relationships. She was an investigator in several externally funded research projects foremost of which was  the Teen Food and Development Study (TeenFADS), a cross-sectional study that investigated the relationship between dietary/lifestyle habits of adolescents and their growth and development, specifically the relationships between habitual soy intake and onset of puberty. Other research projects she was involved in were the Microbiome Study and the innovation of the new survey questionnaire of the Adventist Health Study 2 (AHS-2); the short-term Full Plate Diet trial; and, the recently concluded Healthy Avocado Trial, a multi-site randomized clinical trial investigating the impact of daily avocado intake on energy balance and metabolism, where she served as one of the dietary assessment managers. Dr. Siapco also collaborated with researchers from the Seguimiento Universidad de Navarra (SUN) Study on their secondary data research involving dietary patterns, health, environmental impact, and sustainability outcomes.

Currently, Dr. Siapco is working with a team of researchers from the Universidad Adventista del Plata (River Plate Adventist University) in Argentina together with fellow researchers in the CNHLDP. She is co-principal investigator with  Dr Sandaly Oliveira da Silva Pacheco on a Grant for Reseach and School Partnerships (GRASP) International-funded research project called Adventist Health, Lifestyle, and Environmental Study in Argentina (AHLESA). This research aims to  investigate the associations between the collective dietary and lifestyle factors embodied in the Adventist health message and physical and planetary health parameters using innovative assessment/survey instruments tools in mobile/electronic format. 

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Dr. Siapco’s research interests include designing, developing, and validating innovative dietary assessment tools and healthy lifestyle indexes; children/adolescent's dietary and lifestyle habits and their associations with growth, development, and health; dietary patterns and their health and environmental impact and sustainability; and, the associations between the gut microbiota and health.  She teaches nutrition, research, and public health courses.