Prof. Dr. Louise O. Fresco
President of the Executive Board, Wageningen University & Research
Since July 2014 Professor Louise O. Fresco is President of Wageningen University & Research, in The Netherlands. She combines a long academic career as professor in Wageningen and Amsterdam, with an extensive professional 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 FAO of the UN. She received two national prizes - Comenius and Groeneveld - for her work.
Professor Fresco served as a non-executive director of Unilever, was a member of the supervisory Board of Rabobank and of the Socio-Economic Council of the Netherlands. She is a member of the Council of Advisors of the World Food Prize.
She has twelve non-scientific books published in Dutch, including three novels. In 2013, the six-part documentary Fresco’s Paradise was broadcasted on Dutch TV. The series is based on her book Hamburgers in Paradise, Food in Times of Scarcity and Abundance.