President of Wageningen University and Research, in the Netherlands since 2014. She combines a long academic career as professor in Wageningen and Amsterdam. She is a member of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences and of four foreign Academies, as well as Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Academy of Sciences of South Africa. She served for nearly ten years as Assistant-Director General at the food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. She is also a Member of the Trilateral Commission. She serves as a non-executive director of Unilever. She is a member of the Council of Advisors of the World Food Prize. She was granted her doctoral degree with honours from Wageningen University in 1986, where she specialised in tropical agriculture.
For a reasonably open world
