BIOGRAPHY
Frank Wieringa is research director at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), a public research institute focusing on sustainable development of the Global South. He is director adjoint of the QualiSud research unit, a large research group with over 100 researchers from 6 different institutes, working on food, nutrition and health.
Frank Wieringa holds a MSc biochemistry of University of Amsterdam, and a PhD in nutritional sciences from Wageningen University, besides being an MD. His 2 main areas of research are micronutrient deficiencies and prevention and treatment of acute malnutrition. Concerning micronutrient deficiencies, Frank Wieringa has been working in South-East Asia (Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos) and Africa (Madagascar, Benin and Ghana) on a range of micronutrients (iron, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin B1, vitamin D and folate).
Concerning acute malnutrition, Frank has been working on innovative products for the treatment and prevention of acute malnutrition. In Vietnam, in collaboration with UNICEF and the Ministry of Health, a new Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) based on rice and mung bean was developed. More recent, with UNICEF Cambodia, we developed a locally produced RUTF based on fish as protein source, which had not only the same impact on weight gain and a higher acceptability than imported RUTF, but is also 20% cheaper, allowing the government to treat 20% more children with the same budget. And in Indonesia, Frank Wieringa is part of a research team looking at ways to improve the microbiome of children with acute malnutrition, through the development of microbiome-targeted RUTFs.