VAND Elections
2024 Candidates & Ballots
President-Elect:
Samantha Haswell
Samantha Haswell currently serves as a Clinical Dietitian and Integrative Health Dietitian at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center. In her role she provides one-on-one nutrition counseling to patients undergoing cancer treatment as well as nutrition programming geared towards cancer prevention, active treatment, and long term cancer survivorship.
She has taken on many leadership opportunities in the Virginia area including President of the Greater Richmond Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics from January 2022-June 2023 and President of the Virginia Chapter of the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition from January 2022-January 2024. She is an active member of the Cancer Action Coalition of Virginia and serves on multiple committees at Massey with an overarching goal of improving the lives of patients with cancer in the Virginia area and helping to prevent cancer in the community.
She completed her MS in Human Nutrition at Drexel University in Philadelphia and her dietetic internship at VCU Health System. This past year she was awarded the Emerging Dietetic Leader Award at the VAND Annual Conference and she hopes to continue to support dietitians in the Virginia area as the VAND President-Elect.
Delegate-Elect:
Michelle Hesse
Dr. Michelle (Battista) Hesse received her PhD in Human Nutrition from the Ohio State University Nutrition Program (OSUN) in December 2010. Dr. Hesse’s dissertation was titled School health screening and the utility of acanthosis nigricans to assess for metabolic change and consisted of 7 distinctive research studies utilizing a mixed methods approach with her work resulting in 3 publications.. Her community focused dissertation required her to build relationships with Columbus City Schools Health Division and community stakeholders.
From 2010- 2013, Dr. Hesse assumed several different roles. In June 2011, Dr. Hesse completed a distance dietetic internship through Iowa State University and became a Registered Dietitian in December 2011. Dr. Hesse acquired several consulting roles with The Ohio State University (OSU), working as a project manager to support a seamless suite of community-based programming, aimed at improving better birth outcomes and kindergarten readiness outcomes among children and mothers from pregnancy to age 5. Dr. Hesse was a consultant for OSU’s Food Innovation Center, helping establish a community of academics, students and industry stakeholders to invest and execute collaborative research within the obesity sciences discipline.
Dr. Hesse has 10 years of collegiate level teaching experience. In September 2014, Dr. Hesse joined James Madison University (JMU) as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Hesse has taught 15 unique courses in the nutrition and dietetics curriculum at OSU and JMU and has developed collaborative research methods courses with the JMU honor’s college (2016) and a community innovations course with JMU’s X-labs (2021) and has been a primary research advisor for 4 masters students. Dr. Hesse has published 1 research article (2017) on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and another SoTL manuscript in press evaluating the use of the Learning Record to evaluate student outcomes in an innovations course. Furthermore, Dr. Hesse has presented SoTL research at two conferences in the last 5 years (2017 and 2021).
Dr. Hesse is a leader at the local, state and national level to support nutrition security and health equity. For the past 7 years, Dr. Hesse has focused her efforts on supporting the charitable food network’s strategic goals related to souring healthy foods. Her most notable accomplishment was the collaborative development of Nourish with JMU faculty, students and Blue Ridge Area Food Bank (BR). The Nourish software helps food banks rank and track the nutritional quality of foods Dr. Hesse recently published one paper on Nourish (2018) and in the last 5 years, has conducted 9 peer reviewed oral and poster presentations on the topic of nutrition security.
Dr. Hesse took a hiatus from academia to join BR from 2018-2020 as the Director of Agency Relations and Programs where she led a team of 10 to support 200 food pantries and 175 feeding programs across a 25 county service area. Returning to JMU in 2020, Dr. Hesse continues consulting and service support to the BR and the Federation of Virginia Food Banks (the Federation). Dr. Hesse has served on the Federation’s Health Equity Working Group to support the design of a state-wide health equity plan (2021-2022). Dr. Hesse served on Feeding America’s Reimagining Foods to Encourage Working Group (2019-2020) and was an expert reviewer for the Healthy Eating Research Guidelines in the Charitable Food Network (2019). Dr. Hesse was also the past-president of the Blue Ridge Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (2021-2022 program year) and is currently the President for the Virginia Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (2023-2024).
Recording Secretary
/Strategic Planning Chair:
Stephanie Stockslager
Stephanie is the current dietetic internship director at Virginia Commonwealth University Health System. While currently embracing the education-side of the profession, she spent the first half of her career in clinical inpatient care, and found a special place in her heart for her heart transplant patients.
She has been an active member of the Nutrition and Dietetics Educators and Preceptors (NDEP) counsel for the Academy, serving as Preceptor Director from 2015-2017, and continuing on since as a member of the Preceptor Committee. She led the efforts, working alongside CDR for the awarding of CPEUs for the act of precepting, and has continued her involvement by being a key contributor to the 2023 Preceptor Toolkit.
Additionally, she is the current Awards Chair for VAND and chaired the 2018 VAND Annual Meeting in Richmond. She continues to support at the district level as well through a variety of positions including President (including President-Elect, Past-Chair), Bylaws Chair, Nominating Committee Chair, and currently Media/Website Chair. Her involvement in VAND/GRAND over the last 7 years has opened many doors and introduced her to many inspiring friends and colleagues from around the state.
This has only driven her to want to continue to increase her support (as her time realistically has allowed) and further join the movers and shakers within the Commonwealth. She is an all-in leader who always gives 100% to what she commits to, and has a keen eye on forward thinking, planning, and organizing to ensure maximum efficiency in duties.
In her free time, she enjoys discovering new wineries around the Commonwealth and, more recently, is excited for future international travel vacations!
Treasure-Elect:
Carla Sidhu
Carla Sidhu is currently the president for the Northern Virginia district. She has served previously on the NVAND board as fundraising chair, treasurer and president-elect.
She has been an RD for 11 years and owns her own private practice called Eat2Win Nutrition where she specializes in Women’s Health, Sports Nutrition and Cardiovascular Health. Carla has a passion for teaching others about nutrition and helping them make lasting changes that improve their health markers.
During her free time she enjoys traveling the world with her husband and 3 young daughters, reading books with her book club and focusing on self-care activities like yoga and meditation.
Member Services-Elect:
Meghan Sylvester
Meghan is an accomplished registered dietitian with 17 years of experience in the field. She received her Bachelor of Science from the University of Delaware and completed her didactic internship program at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD.
Meghan has worked in long-term care, food service management, private practice and more recently, women’s health. She works at Shady Grove Fertility (SGF) and specializes in fertility and prenatal nutrition, PCOS and weight management. Meghan supports clients in her home state of Virginia and also maintains licenses to practice in MD, DC, and PA. In addition to individual telehealth services, Meghan presents nutrition and wellness webinars to large audiences nationally, she creates social media content for SGF and mentors dietetic interns in collaboration with the Virginia Tech dietetic program. Meghan is the fundraising chair for the Northern Virginia Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and a gubernatorial appointed representative of the Virginia Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics for the Virginia Department of Health’s Maternal Mortality Review Team.
In her free time, she loves to hike, cook, read and spend time with friends and family.
Phone
703-957-9347
Address
Virginia Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
10221 Krause Rd, PO Box 2304, Chesterfield, VA 23832