Dr. A. Catharine Ross is the Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair and a Professor of Nutrition and Physiology at Penn State University.[1] She studies areas of nutritional science related to the vitamin A molecule.
Ross attended the University of California, Davis and majored in zoology, graduating in 1970.[2] She enrolled for one semester at the University of California, Berkeley, where she took an introductory course in nutrition from Doris Calloway which inspired her later career as a nutritionologist. She married Alex Ross, a photographer, in 1969.[2]
After graduating from the University of California, Davis, Ross enrolled at Cornell, where she completed her master's degree in nutritional science and PhD from the department of biochemistry.[2]
Ross studies the biosynthesis of vitamin A molecules,[3] and how vitamin A factors into the immune response.[2] For her research, Ross has been elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.[3] Since 2004, she has been an editor of the Journal of Nutrition[2] and served two terms as a member of the Board of Food and Nutrition at the National Academy Institute of Medicine from 1997 to 2004.[2]
In 2013, Ross published the 11th edition of the textbook Modern Nutrition in Health and Disease.[4] Ross became a professor at Penn State University in 1997 and head of the nutritional sciences department in 2017.[5]
Ross has authored or coauthored 290 publications and has an h-index of 26.[6]