Rate My Professor Rosalind Gibson

Professor Rosalind Gibson is an Emerita Professor in the Department of Human Nutrition at the University of Otago, within the Division of Health Sciences. She holds a BSc, MS in Public Health (Nutrition) from the School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles, PhD in Nutrition from the University of London, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ). Her career began in the 1960s at the Ethio-Swedish Children's Nutrition Unit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she developed and produced the fortified complementary food Fa-Fa for infants and young children from teff, dried milk powder, legumes, and micronutrients; Fa-Fa remains in production. She participated in collaborative micronutrient research studies in low-income countries including Papua New Guinea, Guatemala, Ghana, Malawi, Zambia, Ethiopia, Thailand, Mongolia, Cambodia, northeast Brazil, and Indonesia. Prior to Otago, she was a faculty member in the Division of Applied Nutrition at the University of Guelph from 1979 to 1995, joining the University of Otago in 1996. Gibson taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses on dietary and laboratory assessment methods, development of screening tools for nutritional status, and micronutrient assessment. She delivered Nutritional Assessment short courses to MSc and PhD students in Ethiopia, Indonesia, Thailand, and India, and supervised theses internationally.

Gibson's research interests center on the assessment and functional health outcomes of micronutrient deficiencies in at-risk populations in low-income countries, with a focus on iron and zinc deficiencies, food-based strategies to combat micronutrient malnutrition, and enhancing micronutrient content and bioavailability in plant-based diets to impact growth and development. She authored the standard reference Principles of Nutritional Assessment, with the third edition's chapters freely available online. Key publications include Diana et al. (2021), 'Determination of modifiable risk factors for length-for-age z-scores among resource-poor Indonesian infants' (PLoS ONE); Leong et al. (2021), 'Differences in micronutrient intakes of exclusive and partially breastfed Indonesian infants from resource-poor households' (Journal of Nutrition); Gibson et al. (2020), 'Association of maternal diet, micronutrient status, and milk volume with milk micronutrient concentrations in Indonesian mothers at 2 and 5 months postpartum' (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition); and Daniels et al. (2019), 'Micronutrient intakes of lactating mothers and their association with breast milk concentrations' (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition). She received the McHenry Award (Canadian Society of Nutritional Sciences), Rank Prize (British Nutrition Foundation), Lifetime Achievements in Global Nutrition Research Award, McCollum Award, and E. V. McCollum International Lectureship (American Society for Nutrition), and an honorary DSc (University of Guelph, 2022). Gibson co-directed the WHO Collaborating Centre for Nutrition in the Western Pacific Region until 2017, served as an expert adviser for WHO and FAO, and was an Emerita member of the International Zinc Nutrition Collaborative Group.