Biography

Andrew Prentice heads the Nutrition & Planetary Health Theme at the MRC Unit The Gambia @ London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He also directs the group’s permanent field laboratory, MRC Keneba, in rural Gambia.

Born and bred in Uganda, he received a BSc in Biochemistry from Leeds and PhD in Nutrition from Cambridge University. Following 5 years of post-doctoral work in Keneba he returned to the UK to lead the Energy Regulation and Obesity Group at the MRC Dunn Clinical Nutrition Centre, Addenbrooke’s Hospital. During this period he was involved in the development and exploitation of numerous novel technologies including stable isotope methods for assessing breastmilk intake and free-living energy expenditure (doubly-labelled water, 2H218O), and whole-body calorimetry.

In 1999 he left Cambridge to establish the MRC International Nutrition Group at LSHTM and refocus his attention exclusively on studying diet-disease relationships in low-income countries. The work of his research team is focused in 4 areas: Early Growth & Development; Iron, Infection & Anemia; Nutritional Genetics & Epigenetics; Nutrition Related Chronic Disease. The emphasis is on discovery science in response to a conviction that the development of more effective public health interventions is still greatly hampered by critical knowledge gaps.

Andrew has been a member of numerous national and international advisory committees on nutrition and is a former Vice-President of EASO and past Chair of the International Nutrition Council of the American Society for Nutrition (ASN). He is an elected Council Member of the International Union of Nutritional Sciences (IUNS) and the Federation of African Nutrition Societies (FANUS). His work has been recognised by a number of national and international awards. He has published over 500 peer-reviewed papers with over 90000 citations and an H-index of 135. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and in 2023 was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences.