Regina Vasilatos-Younken
Dr. Vasilatos-Younken is professor of endocrine physiology and nutrition in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State, and served as chair of the University Park component of the Intercollege Graduate Degree Program in Physiology prior to accepting the position of senior associate dean of the Graduate School. Dr. Vasilatos-Younken began her baccalaureate degree program in biology at New York University, and completed her B.S. in animal and pre-veterinary science at the University of Maine at Orono and her Ph.D. in animal nutrition at Penn State. She worked as a research associate in the Nutrition Unit of the Roman L. Hruska U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Clay Center, NE, and in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State, before joining the faculty in the College of Agricultural Sciences in 1983.
In her tenure at Penn State, Dr. Vasilatos-Younken developed a basic research program in the endocrine regulation of postnatal growth and metabolism, targeting the metabolic effects of growth hormone and involving collaborators from around the world. She also developed patented technologies to reduce contamination of meat animal carcasses. Dr. Vasilatos-Younken team-taught undergraduate courses in animal nutrition and comparative physiology and graduate courses in metabolic and endocrine physiology, and served on graduate program steering committees in nutrition, physiology, and animal sciences. She is author or co-author of more than seventy published research papers and proceedings and an equal number of abstracts, and in 1993, she received the Poultry Science Association Research Award. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Endocrine Society, The American Society of Animal Science, and the Poultry Science Association.