IFR Annual Lecture: What are your individual nutritional needs?

1st October 2014

IFR Lecture 2014[1390]IFR’s Annual Public Lecture is now available to view online. The Lecture was presented by Dr Wim Saris MD, Maastricht University Medical Centre, and took place on 25th September at the Assembly House in Norwich.

 

About Prof. Wim H. M. Saris

Wim H.M. Saris (1949) earned his degree in Human Nutrition at Wageningen University (WUR) and his MD degree at Nijmegen Catholic University, both in The Netherlands.

His PhD-thesis (1982) was related to “Nutrition, physical activity and fitness in children”.

In 1982 he joined the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences at Maastricht University, where he was appointed Professor of Human Nutrition in 1988. In 1992 he initiated NUTRIM (School for Nutrition, Toxicology and Metabolism) and was its Scientific Managing Director from 1992 till 2005.

In 2005 he part-time joined DSM as Corporate Scientist Human Nutrition at DSM Food Specialties (DFS) The Netherlands.

From 2009 -2014 he was Scientific Director for the Nutrition and Health program within TIFN, the Dutch Top Institute for Food and Nutrition, a collaboration between Food industry and academic institutes.

He currently combines his work as Corporate Scientist with his chair at Maastricht University.

His major research interest is energy metabolism and substrate utilization under different conditions, such as athletic performance, obesity, type-2 diabetes and cancer. His research has a particular emphasis on the development of functional food solutions.

Furthermore, Wim Saris is actively involved in the field of general human nutrition, gene-nutrient interaction in the gut and genetic susceptibility in relation to nutrition (Nutrigenomics).

He is author or co-author of 7 books and over more than 400 scientifically refereed articles dealing with topics as nutrition, obesity, type 2 diabetes, exercise physiology, cancer cachexia and nutrigenomics.

He has served on many national and international committees, among others the Dutch Health and Nutrition Council and the Recommended Daily Allowances committee and the Scientific Committee on Food (now called EFSA) of the European Commission in Brussels and the European Technology Platform (ETP) initiative “Food for Life”. He chaired the EU Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) “ A healthy diet for a healthy life” from 2010 till 2014. This is a new initiative within the EU to coordinate the national research programs of the different member states to avoid duplication of research and to strengthen the European innovation in food and nutrition research.