Left to right: Corinna Hawkes, Stuart Gillespie, Barbara Burlingame, Renato Maluf, Chunming Chen, Edgard Rebouças: six more speakers at Rio2012

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Access Rio2012 programme structure here
Access Rio2012 theme, purposes and principles here
Access first line-up of speakers here
Access second line-up of speakers here
Access third line-up of speakers here
Register for Rio2012 here

A special feature of our Rio2012 congress is that many of our invited speakers will also participate throughout the meeting. We are breaking down the divide between 'experts' and 'audiences'. Congress sessions will all be interactive. Speakers will also join other sessions as participants, and will learn as well as lead. Our congress committees are devoted to ensuring that everybody present at the congress will be engaged and enthused. The principles of the congress are its beginning and the congress itself is the middle stage. It is what comes afterwards that most matters, as everybody becomes committed to move knowledge and policies, into effective and equitable actions at all levels from global to local.

This month's participant-speakers profiled

Corinna Hawkes is a British food and nutrition policy analyst. She has particular expertise in linking broader food system issues with food, diet and nutrition, such as globalisation, agricultural policy and trade. She has special knowledge of the impact of the advertising of ultra-processed products on children. She has worked with the World Health Organization, and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and with Association member and fellow Rio2012 speaker Carlos Monteiro at the University of São Paulo

Stuart Gillespie is British. He is a senior research fellow with the Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division of IFPRI, and is chief executive officer of the Transform Nutrition Research Program Consortium. a six-partner consortium that seeks to transform thinking and action on 'the neglected crisis of undernutrition' in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. He also coordinates the Agriculture and Health Research Platform, an initiative of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) with which IFPRI is associated. He is an authority on how to make food and nutrition interventions effective.

Barbara Burlingame is from New Zealand. She is principal officer in the Nutrition and Consumer Protection Division of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) where she has worked since 1998. She is an authority on food composition. She has been director of the international food composition initiative INFOODS and also editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Food Composition and Analysis.

Renato Maluf is a Brazilian economist with a postdoctoral degree from Oxford University (UK) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France). He has been president of the National Food and Nutrition Security Council (CONSEA) in Brazil from 2007-2011. He is currently a member of the steering committee of the high-level panel of experts within the UN Committee on World Food Security.

Chunming Chen is an national authority on the nutritional status of children and also of the general population of China, and on the changes and developments of Chinese food systems and supplies and consequent dietary patterns. She has extensive experience at the highest level within United Nations agencies and was vice-chair of the study group chaired by Association member Philip James, responsible for the 1990 WHO report on Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases. At that time she was president of the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine in Beijing. She is also linked with the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). She has extensive academic experience.

Edgard Rebouças is Brazilian. He is chair of the Media Observatory responsible for monitoring records and experience on matters concerning human rights. He is a member of the council of the Alana Institute project on children and consumerism. He is also a contributor to the Brazilian ANVISA official agency concerned with food surveillance, specialising in issues to do with the advertising of food and drug products.

We will be featuring more Rio2012 speaker-participants in the next three months. For the full list of confirmed speakers, click here. Also stay tuned for more information on Facebook and Twitter!