From left: Joseph Ashong, Rosangela Pereira, Michael Nelson, Paul Aryee,
Sangita Sharma, Trias Mahmudiono: members from the main continents

The membership team reports: Here we introduce six more members. At left above is Joseph Ashong currently a PhD student at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. He tells in his profile about his conviction about how with proper nutrition most of our health problems can be prevented.

Next, Rosangela Pereira is from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, (where we are having our congress, Rio2012). She has also worked in Mozambique, in its Ministry of Health.

Michael Nelson, third from left, is the director of research and nutrition for the UK School Food Trust, whose task is to improve school food and to increase the number of pupils eating a school lunch every day. In his profile he says how he became aware of the importance of public health nutrition: 'While still at university, I was invited to work with Myron Winick and Pedro Rosso in the sub-sub-basement of New York Hospital to investigate nutritional factors that turned cellular growth on and off. This was pre-genomics days, and our research by today's standards was pretty crude. It involved measuring the DNA and RNA content of the harvested organs of malnourished rats. I quickly realised this was not my first choice of career. But it awakened an interest in better public nutrition. We were trying to find out what controlled cellular division and growth, so we could turn growth back on in malnourished children living in Jamaica. Instead, I learned that politics, education and income inequality were at the heart of the problem'.

Paul Aryee, third from right, is from Ghana. He lived a large part of his life in Tamale, the northern capital, where it was common for children to die from malnutrition and other closely related causes.

Next is Sangita Sharma, a UK citizen working in Canada, whose research experience combines nutritional sciences, epidemiology, health promotion and community-based interventions.

Trias Mahmudiono, right, who has professional experience in Australia, is from Indonesia. He is currently working as a lecturer in the nutrition department of the faculty of public health, at the University of Airlangga. He says in his profile: 'I was adopted by my parents and was frequently ill during childhood, presumably because of not being breastfed at all. I first became aware of the importance of nutrition at secondary school. I was then a dining hall prefect, and there was famine in the region as a result of a drought in the previous farming season. School meals were drastically reduced, and most students had to resort to various coping mechanisms in order to survive. School was shut down for a while, and when it re-opened many students showed signs of malnutrition. It was also evident that students who had enough food to eat, mostly from affluent homes, had not changed much in terms of their nutritional status'.

These life stories make us feel identified and united, we are not alone in our paths. There are people all around the world with similar beliefs and intentions. That is what the Association is all about, constructing together.