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Twenty First Annual Darwin College Lecture Series 2006

SURVIVAL

Lecture 6   :   24 February

SURVIVING FAMINE

Andrew Prentice

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Biography   |   Abstract  |   Printable Version   |   Podcast Preview

Biography

Andrew Prentice is Professor of International Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is also the scientific director of the MRC Nutrition Programme based around the rural village of Keneba in The Gambia, West Africa. He was born and bred in Uganda and has maintained a deep love for Africa. He trained in biochemistry and then nutrition at Darwin College, Cambridge. His early post- doctoral research was based in The Gambia and concentrated on the effects of protein-energy malnutrition on reproduction and child health. He then returned to Cambridge to lead the Energy Metabolism Group at the MRC's Dunn Clinical Nutrition Centre at Addenbrookes'. Here his group used a variety of state-of-the-art techniques (including whole-body calorimetry, and the doubly-labelled water method) to investigate the basic mechanisms regulating human energy balance. As the obesity pandemic started to gain momentum in the 1980s his research was inevitably drawn in this direction. By the late 1990s he had concluded that the main causes of obesity where environmental rather than genetic or metabolic, and decided to re-focus his research on diet-disease relationships in low income countries. In 1999 he created the MRC International Nutrition Group in London and in addition to the Gambia programme has collaborative projects in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Chile, Kenya, Zanzibar and South Africa. He has a strong interest in the evolutionary consequences of famine particularly as mediated through effects on human reproduction. His work has been recognised by a number of international awards including the Peter-Debye International Science Prize, the Gunnar-Levin Nutrition Medal, the BNF, FENS and SINR Medals, and the Edna and Robert Langholz International Nutrition Award. He is a fellow of Darwin College.

The lectures are given at 5.30 p.m. in The Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue, with an adjacent overflow theatre with live TV coverage. Each lecture is typically attended by 600 people so you must arrive early to ensure a place.