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Centre for Public Health & Policy

Advisory Board


Mary Penny (IIN) I am a Cambridge-Birmingham university trained British physician. After working in the NHS and completing MRCP. I came to Peru in the 1980s to research malnutrition, diarrhoea and the microflora of the intestine. Since 1989 onwards, I have made Peru my home and continued research mainly in nutrition and infectious diseases. Currently I am involved in HPV vaccine clinicals trials in the community; health services research, a longitudinal study of long-term consequences of nutrition additions to complementary foods for infants; and the nutrition, health and growth aspects, as well as the field work, for the Young Lives project. I have been Director General of the Instituto de Investigacion Nutricional since 1999 to the present. I am a Corresponding Member of the Faculty at Harvard Medical School. I was awarded an MBE in 2013.
Sabine Mercier (Titular Researcher, IIN – Coordinator of projects) Is a nutrition and epidemiology expert who has been working and living in developing countries for 18 years now. In Africa with HIV/AIDS and malnutrition, and then in Central and Latin America for different UN agencies (FAO, WFP) and recently leading the INRA/CIRAD-funded DIVERSYCAO project evaluating the food security and dietary diversity of indigenous Awajun populations practicing agroforestry in the Peruvian Amazon. She is now the Peruvian director of the research team for the GANA project, Newton-Paulet/Medical Research Center funding, along with the British team at the Natural Resources Institute from the Greenwich University.
Hilary M Creed-Kanashiro (IIN) Hilary Creed-Kanashiro is a Senior Researcher and member of the Ethics Committee of the Institute of Nutritional Research, with B.Sc in Nutrition and Dietetics from the University of Surrey, UK and earned his Master's Degree in Human Metabolism Philosophy at London University, UK . Her main research areas which are being developed are public nutrition: formative research and educational interventions in the areas of complementary infant feeding, supplementation and responsive feeding, agriculture and nutrition, biodiversity and diet diversity, traditional foods, food security and consumption evaluation.
Alan Sanchez Alan is a Doctor of Economics from the University of Oxford, an institution that also awarded him the Master in Economics for Development (MSc in Economics for development). He is currently a Principal Investigator of a development analysis organization called GRADE (Grupo de Analisis para el desarrollo). Also, he is Principal Investigator of the Children of the Millennium study, and Academic Visitor of the Department of International Development of the University of Oxford. Previously, he was an economic research specialist of the Economic Studies Department of the Central Reserve Bank of Peru. His areas of interest include: education economics, health economics, labor economics and behavioral economics.