Louise O. Fresco
President and Chairman Executive Board, Wageningen UR
Since July 2014 Professor Louise O. Fresco is President of Wageningen UR (University and Research centre), in The Netherlands. She combines a long academic career as professor in Wageningen and Amsterdam, with various visiting professorships, and an extensive involvement in policy and development. She is a member of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences and of four foreign Academies, as well as Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Academy of Sciences of South Africa. She served for nearly ten years as Assistant-Director General at the a Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, spent extensive periods in Africa, Asia and Latin America. She is also a member of the Trilateral Commission. In 2014 the EU Commission asked her to chair the Evaluation of the Seventh Framework Program for Research. She received two national prizes - Comenius and Groeneveld - for her work.