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Associate Professor Regina Belski

Adjunct Professor
PhD(Medicine), The University of Western Australia, Australia; Bachelor of Nutrition and Dietetics (Honours), Deakin University, Australia

Biography

Dr Regina Belski is an Adjunct Professor of Dietetics at Swinburne University of Technology. She is also an Advanced Accredited Practising Dietitian (AdvAPD) and Advanced Sports Dietitian (AdvSD).

Regina is the Inaugural Course Director of the Master of Dietetics program at Swinburne, which was launched in 2018. She is a highly regarded dietetics researcher and experienced clinician in sports dietetics and leads nutrition research at Swinburne.

Regina specialises in a personalised nutrition approach for health and performance, this entails exploring factors which impact on individuals’ dietary intakes and health outcomes, including modifiable factors such as nutrition knowledge, behaviour and more advanced fields such as nutrigenomics and variation of gene expression via dietary means as well as functional foods for human health and the microbome.

Her research is multi-dimensional, cross disciplinary and collaborative and she lead significant work in five distinct, yet complimentary, areas: sports nutrition, functional food, nutrigenomics, metabolic health and scholarship of teaching. She has successfully obtained almost $2,000,000 of grant funding in the last 5 years and had over 500 citations of her work since 2015.

Dr Belski’s research has resulted in the development of the Nutrition for Sport Knowledge Questionnaire (NSKQ) and the Abridged Nutrition for Sport Knowledge Questionnaire (A-NSKQ) the first internationally published tools which have been validated and are freely available to all researchers and sports science staff worldwide. These tools have already had a significant impact on the profession, having been requested and utilised by hundreds of different researchers/sports professionals since its development in 2017 and are in the process of being translated into 11 different languages: Japanese, Korean, Icelandic, Chinese, Turkish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Slovenian, German and Malay. It has enabled not only researchers, but sports nutrition professionals including those working with Olympic teams, high performance sports teams (e.g. soccer, rugby, AFL) and recreational athletes from around the world to accurately assess nutrition knowledge gaps and help educate athletes to optimise their nutrition, health and performance.

Dr Belski completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia undertaking research focused on weight management and reduction of cardiovascular disease risk in overweight individuals utilising novel functional foods. In her professional capacity as an Accredited Practising Dietitian, Regina has worked with clients including Olympic athletes and AFL players.

In recognition of her expertise in nutrition research, Dr Belski is a reviewer for the highly ranked British Journal of Nutrition, and an NHMRC project grant reviewer.

In addition to her research expertise, Dr Belski is also a highly regarded teacher, and in 2014 was awarded the Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT), Citation for outstanding contribution to student learning: “For creating an engaging, practice-oriented learning environment in nutrition and dietetics which inspires students to become self-reflective, independent, life-long learners.”

Research interests

Biomedical science; Health Promotion; Nutrition

PhD candidate and honours supervision

Higher degrees by research

Accredited to supervise Masters & Doctoral students as Principal Supervisor.

Honours

Available to supervise honours students.

Fields of Research

  • Nutrition And Dietetics - 321000

Teaching areas

Biomedical science;Health Promotion;Nutrition

Awards

  • 2014, National, Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning, Australian Government Office of Learning and Teaching
  • 2014, Other, Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning, La Trobe University
  • 2011, National, Australian Fresh Scientist, Fresh Science, Australian Government Funded

Publications

Also published as: Belski, Regina; Belski, R.
This publication listing is provided by Swinburne Research Bank. If you are the owner of this profile, you can update your publications using our online form.

Recent research grants awarded

  • 2019: A short-term potato-enriched diet to support muscle accretion and promote substrate metabolism adaptations in recreationally active individuals *; Alliance for Potato Research and Education
  • 2019: Nutritional strategies for optimising performance and resilience during combat training (Student) *; Defence Science Technology Group
  • 2019: Targeting the gut microbiome to enhance the health, performance and resilience of the Australian Warfighter *; Human Performance Research Network, Department of Defence

* Chief Investigator


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