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.jpg "Leila Saldanha, PhD, RD, FAND photo")
Scientific Consultant (contractor)
NIH, ODS
Dr. Leila Saldanha moved from Bombay, India to purse graduate degrees in nutrition at Kansas State University. As a graduate student at KSU, she was awarded twice the prestigious merit General Foods Fund Fellowship and Mae Baird Memorial Scholarship. Her first full-time job in the U.S. was as Assistant Professor and Director of the Dietetics Program at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois. From SIU, she moved on to work at the Kellogg Company for over ten years, starting as Manager Nutrition Communications in Battle Creek, Michigan, where she managed successful partnership programs with Medical and Nutrition groups. Her last position at Kellogg’s was as Director Nutrition and Scientific Affairs for the AsiaPacific Region, based in Sydney, Australia. She moved to Sydney, Australia in 1996 to work under Carlos Gutierrez, (former Chairman of the Kellogg Company and Commerce Secretary) then Area President, to integrate nutrition into the long- and short-term business plans for the region, which included Japan, South Korea, Greater China, India, ASEAN countries, Australia, and New Zealand. After she returned from Australia, she accepted the position of Vice-President at the Consumer Healthcare Products Association in Washington, D.C. in 1999. Formerly the Nonprescription Drug Manufacturers Association, CHPA is a trade organization representing the makers of OTC medicines, dietary supplements and medical devices. She was the first person to be hired to lead the association’s dietary supplement initiatives. At CHPA, she led the creation of the AOAC International dietary supplement task force charged with developing validated analytical methods for dietary supplements, and the Annual Bibliography of Significant Advances in Dietary Supplement Research in partnership with the Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS), at the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Saldanha has been working as a Scientific Consultant at the ODS since 2003, where she serves as the subject-matter expert for the Dietary Supplements Label Database (DSLD) and the Dietary Supplement Ingredient Database (DSID). At ODS, she coordinated the Bioactive Food Components ad hoc Federal working group that undertook defining bioactive components and exploring approaches to evaluating their significance in health promotion and disease prevention. She also played a lead role in the formation and implementation of the Dietary Supplements Analytical Methods and Reference Materials Program and continued to coordinate publication of the Annual Bibliographies of Significant Advances in Dietary Supplement Research.
Dr Saldanha is a Fellow of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) and an active professional member of AND, and the American Society for Nutrition. She has given numerous talks and is a lead author or coauthor on well-over 100 publications. Her current talks and papers focus on describing dietary supplement products, such as prescription and nonprescription prenatal supplements, and their labeling.