Other Appointments:

Professor, Family & Preventive Medicine, Rush Medical College

Overview:
Christine C. Tangney, PhD, FACN, CNS, a professor in both the College of Health Sciences and in Medicine. She was formerly the associate dean for research in the College of Health Sciences. Her expertise is in assessment of dietary behaviors of individuals and population samples in relation to cardiovascular and cognitive health.

Her early research focused on pulmonary disease and nutrition assessment at the bench, but evolved to include population approaches in nutritional epidemiology. Much of her recent efforts focus on the development of short dietary screeners to monitor changes in dietary behaviors and key biomarkers of young pre-hypertensive African-American women, women who are middle-aged or older with cardiovascular risk, individuals with Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease, as well as breast cancer survivors.

Understanding what constitutes meaningful dietary changes — and conversely, dietary stability —is a critical component of her research. Her earlier research centered on the influence of dietary antioxidants, particularly vitamin E in Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, and heart diseases. She served as a co-investigator nutritionist on numerous grants, Women’s Health Initiative, the Chicago Health and Aging Nutrition project, and the Memory and Aging Project, an ongoing cohort of older persons in Chicago. She is currently site P/I for the US POINTER study (multi-site), where older adults from various communities in Chicago are assigned to one of two intervantions designed to understand what preserves cognitive health. She is also co-P/I of another trial in which specific diet patterns are being tested to reduce cognitive decline. Finally, she is the nutrition co-investigator on another trial led by Dr Beth Lynch examining medication and diet adherence in church congregants with uncontrolled blood pressure.

Tangney has mentored over 150 graduate students in clinical nutrition, as well as doctoral candidates in the College of Health Sciences (Rush) and the School of Health and Human Sciences (University of North Carolina) and served on more than 90 thesis or dissertation committees for graduate students in the Colleges of Health Sciences and of Nursing. She has been privileged to hood more than 10 graduating classes in the College of Health Sciences’ Master’s in Clinical Nutrition program.

My ORCID is 0000-0002-2431-9687
My Scopus ID is 55710492500
My NIH COMMONS name is CTANGNEY

Education:
1980 Doctor of Philosophy, Human Nutrition, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
1976 Master of Science, Human Nutrition, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Thesis
1973, Bachelor of Arts, Biological Sciences, State University of New York at Buffalo