Professor Roger Whitehead PhD, FRSB, FRCP, FRCPCH, FAfN, CBE was Director of the MRC Dunn Nutrition Unit at Cambridge and Keneba, The Gambia, from 1973 to 1998.
Prior to that he was Director of the MRC Child Nutrition Unit in Uganda from 1968 to 1973. He is also a Fellow and a past Vice-Master of Darwin College, Cambridge. He is a past Chairman of Council of the British Nutrition Foundation. He has had close academic links with a number of nutrition departments in British universities as well as in Uganda and China.
His personal area of research was Maternal and Child Nutrition, especially in the developing world covering of states of malnutrition such as kwashiorkor and marasmus as well as the relationship between diet and healthy pregnancy and lactation outcomes.
As a member of the Department of Health Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy, he chaired the panel which produced the Report on Dietary Reference Values for Food Energy and Nutrients for the United Kingdom, published in 1991. He has also served as an advisor on various WHO, FAO and UNU committees.
Although not medically qualified, he is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Since 1973, he has been a Fellow of the Institute of Biology (now FRSB) and from 1998 a Fellow of the International Union of Nutritional Sciences (IUNS). In 1992, he was appointed a CBE.
In retirement his main academic links have been back in Uganda at the School of Food Technology, Nutrition and Bioengineering at Makerere University, where he helped to set up a Master’s degree course in Applied Human Nutrition.