Professor Rainer Gross, born in 1945 in Germany, has a distinguished career in community nutrition development through agriculture, notably in Latin America and Southeast Asia, but also in Africa. He has displayed a consciousness and strategic approach that has embraced the spectrum of human need from proverty alleviation to health advancement. Fortunately for public health and clinical nutrition in the Asia Pacific region, from 1989 to 1998 he led the SEAMEO (South East Asian Ministry of Education Organization) project on Training in Community Nutrition, based at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta. He became a Foundation Member of the Asia Pacific Clinical Nutrition Society (APCNS) in 1992. It is gratifying to people in the filed of human health that agricultural scientists like Rainer Gross have brought such a thoroughly food-based approach to the human condition. What is fascinating is that he began his work in community development with a focus on crops in Peru (1972-82), on the eastern rim of the South pacific (in the Andes), and returned there in 1999-2002 to strengthen the agricultural, food and health sciences in the tertiary education sector. His Asia Pacific reach has been geographically wide and scientifically deep.

His life-span approach has also been noteworthy, with a major role in the nutrition, ageing and urban environmental project, CRONOS (complimentary to the IUNS FHILL project and the European SENECA project on Nutrition and Ageing). In 2002 he assumes the role of Chief of the Nutrition Section for UNICEF, based in New York. His support for international and regional nutritional organizations, like IUNS (International Union of Nutritional Sciences), for which he has chaired committees on urbanization and on the environment (and now the Task Force on Eco-Nutrition), and the APCNS, with its Journal (APJCN) and COuncil subcommittees, has helped create strong and effective nutrition networks. APCNS and IUNS look forward to a new era of human development as they collaborate with him in his UNICEF role for childre.

Like those before, as the 10^th recipient of the APCNS award, he is recognized for his contribution to the health advancement of people of the Asia Pacific region through nutrition.

Mark L Wahlqvist AO, MD, FRACP

Editor-in-Chief

Immediate Past President, APCNS

President, IUNS