Driving Impact Through Collaboration: Edith Feskens’s vision as HDHL Vice-Chair
With the recent handover of the HDHL Chair position, the HDHL Management Board also welcomed a new Vice-Chair: Prof. Edith Feskens. In this short interview, she shares her vision for HDHL, her background in research, and what she believes should be top of mind as HDHL moves into a new strategic phase.
Bridging the worlds of food, agriculture, and health remains HDHL’s central mission
“Agriculture and the food industry should be informed on what to produce for a healthy and sustainable society,” says Edith Feskens, professor of Global Nutrition at Wageningen University. “And of course, the health sector needs to better understand the role unhealthy and unsustainable diets play.”
This drive to connect sectors and disciplines has guided her professional journey – and shapes her vision for HDHL.
About Edith Feskens
Prof. Edith Feskens is Professor of Global Nutrition and Dean of Research at Wageningen University. Trained as a nutrition scientist and epidemiologist, she has long worked in the field of obesity, diabetes, and nutritional epidemiology. Over the past decade, she expanded her focus to include disadvantaged populations and low- and middle-income countries. She led the large HDHL project FoodBall on food biomarkers and served as member and Chair of the HDHL Scientific Advisory Board.
Priorities for HDHL include policy-relevant research and innovative implementation
At a time when policymakers are urgently looking for answers, Edith says HDHL must help connect research to real-life implementation. “We need to focus more on implementation of projects which were shown to be effective in a pilot setting, but now need to be scaled up or implemented in practice.”
At the same time, she’s quick to emphasise the need to keep investing in basic science. “Who would have thought 25 years ago that the microbiome would be so important for human health, or that obesity could be treated so effectively with medication? We still discover new roles of nutrients and compounds, new biological mechanisms.”
Achieving impact means involving stakeholders early and staying close to society’s needs
Asked how HDHL can better translate research into public health improvements, Edith emphasises co-creation: “It’s important to take relevant stakeholders on board early in projects. And HDHL should continue its role of defining research agendas based on real societal needs.”
She also believes that digital tools and public engagement can help increase research impact: “Of course, the impact on public health usually takes many years, but with the use of social media, relationships with politicians, and main ‘influencers’, we could probably achieve more than in the past."
I would love to build a new city with an optimal food environment to help citizens live a healthy life with minimal pressure on the environment.
It’s a bold idea, but one that reflects the kind of systems thinking she believes is needed to truly improve public health. For Edith, it’s not just about individual choices — it’s about reshaping the environments people live in, combining education, infrastructure, food systems, and policy to make the healthy and sustainable choice the easy choice. This vision also underscores HDHL’s role in fostering interdisciplinary research and multi-sector collaboration.
From early inspiration to future direction: shaping HDHL’s next chapter
Edith’s interest in nutrition began long before her academic career. “I wrote a paper on reducing meat intake during my high-school period, for the biology course in 1978, based on the book of Peter Singer published in 1975: Animal Liberation,” she recalls. “In hindsight, it stimulated my interest in nutrition.”
This early commitment has carried through her entire career — and now shapes her role in helping HDHL define its future direction. Together with the incoming Chair and broader Management Board, Edith has been closely involved in shaping HDHL’s new vision, mission, and strategic objectives, which will be published soon.
As HDHL enters this new phase, her leadership will help ensure the initiative remains both scientifically robust and deeply connected to the societal challenges it aims to address.