Robert P. Heaney, M.D., F.A.C.P., F.A.C.N., F.A.S.N.

John A. Creighton University Professor
Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine
Creighton University
Omaha, Nebraska

Dr. Heaney completed his undergraduate and medical degrees at Creighton. He interned and served his residency in Internal Medicine at St. Louis City Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, and served Research Fellowships at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He has held faculty appointments at the University of Oklahoma, at George Washington University, and at Creighton, where for nine years he served as Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine from 1961?1969. Dr. Heaney was Creighton’s first Vice-President for Health Sciences, a position he held from 1971?1984, and since 1984 has held the all-university chair named in honor of the University’s founder.

Dr. Heaney serves or has served on the editorial boards of all the major scientific publications in the field of bone biology and chaired the Scientific Advisory Panel on Osteoporosis of the Office of Technology Assessment (U.S. Congress). He is a past member of the Board of Directors of Loyola University of Chicago and of the Association of Academic Health Centers, and currently is an emeritus member of the Board of Trustees of the National Osteoporosis Foundation. He served as a member of the panel on Calcium and Related Nutrients of the Food and Nutrition Board (NAS) in the most recent setting of the DRIs for bone-related nutrients.

Dr. Heaney has worked for over 50 years in the study of osteoporosis, vitamin D, and calcium physiology. He is the author of three books and has published over 400 original papers, chapters, monographs, and reviews in scientific and educational fields. The major theme of his work has been quantitative physiology, for example, the elucidation of how much vitamin D was necessary to produce the nutrient’s canonical effect on calcium absorption, how much vitamin D is metabolized each day, how much vitamin D is synthesized in the skin, and the degree to which skin pigmentation modifies that synthesis, how much vitamin D is stored, and the extent to which input levels modify that change.

At the same time, he has engaged nutritional policy issues and has helped redefine the context for estimating nutrient requirements. Specifically he has shown that nutrient deficiencies produce long-latency disease as well as their classical acute disorders, and has focused attention on the inadequacy of drug-based research designs for the evaluation of nutrient efficacy.

He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Kappa Delta Award of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the Alumni Achievement Citation of his alma mater. In 1990 he was awarded honorary membership in The American Dietetic Association, and in 1993 he was elected Fellow of the American College of Nutrition, both in recognition of his work in delineating human calcium absorptive performance and in defining human calcium requirements. In 1994 he received the Frederic C. Bartter Award of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research in recognition of his career in clinical research. Additionally, he received France’s Institut Candia Scientific Prize, the E.V. McCollum Award of the American Society for Clinical Nutrition in recognition of his contributions to nutritional science and medicine, the McCollum International Lectureship of the American Society for Nutritional Sciences for his work with vitamin D, and. he received the Atwater Award of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.