Background and Rules
Background of the Prize
The Rainer Gross Prize: Recent Innovations in Nutrition and Health in Developing Societies was created by the Hildegard Grunow Foundation to honour the memory of the late Dr. Rainer Gross and memorialise his unique approach to innovation in concepts and research in critical -- but novel -- areas of inquiry, with a view to better the nutrition and health of the less fortunate. With the awarding of this Prize, we recognize the merits of others who continue the generation and pursuit of innovative ideas and projects in nutrition and health in developing societies. The Prize is endowed with 2500 USD, and will be awarded biennially on the occasion of a large international nutrition-related meeting. The first award was made to Aaron Lechtig of Peru and Angela Cespedes of Bolivia in September 2010, on the occasion of the II World Congress of Public Health Nutrition in Porto, Portugal.
The award ceremony includes a lecture by the awardee(s) on the work being recognized and the presentation of the certificate and the monetary award. The awardee(s) are invited to write a corresponding review-style, overview article regarding the background of the innovation, to be published in the Food and Nutrition Bulletin.
Rules of nomination and application
Selection criteria
- Submitted work must be recent (conducted within the last 5 years) and innovative – i.e. judged as making needy communities at nutritional risk and fellow professionals aware of previously unrecognized problems, while beginning to open a pathway to their practical solution.
- Such concepts should have sufficient supporting evidence regarding their feasibility and likely applicability. Moreover, they should have passed beyond the "idea" stage into proof-of-principle evidence or initial (“pilot”) demonstration, although the derivative findings do not necessarily need to have been formally published in the scientific or technical literature at the time of the Prize application.
- Topics may include the entire gamut of problems related to human nutrition, ranging from the molecular to the population level. This does not exclude technical inventions and plant- or animal-breeding initiatives, provided they are original and novel and deemed likely to solve important nutritional problems for disadvantaged people in developing countries.
