David Nabarro

Advertising and content can be personalised based on your profile. Your activity on this service can be used to build or improve a profile about you for personalised advertising and content. Advertising and content performance can be measured. Reports can be generated based on your activity and those of others. Your activity on this service can help develop and improve products and services. Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Physician and international-health strategist David Nabarro, whose career included posts at the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations, played a central part in tackling some of the world’s most pressing health crises — from malnutrition and malaria to Ebola and COVID-19. He died on 25 July at his home in Ferney-Voltaire, France. Nabarro studied nutrition at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), which shaped his multidisciplinary approach to sustainable development. It later inspired the creation of his 4SD Foundation (skills, systems and synergies for sustainable development), which focuses on nutrition and building climate-change resilience, and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2018, he was co-recipient of the World Food Prize for his work against malnutrition. Educated at Oundle School, UK, Nabarro studied medicine at the University of Oxford, UK, and University College London, qualifying in 1973. His first medical post was meant to be under an Oxford professor who was a friend of his father, the distinguished endocrinologist John Nabarro. But on the eve of starting, David sent word that he was in Kurdistan on humanitarian work and would not return for months — an early sign of his lifelong commitment to social justice and a career that would stretch far beyond the boundaries of conventional biomedicine. At the LSHTM, his mentor in nutrition was John Waterlow, an eminent physiologist and authority on childhood malnutrition. After completing his master’s degree in nutrition, Nabarro joined the non-governmental organization Save the Children, where he led the analysis of the Kosi Hills rural development programme in eastern Nepal. He discovered that children of migrant road-construction workers had dangerously high rates of vitamin A deficiency, and he campaigned to improve both their nutrition and working conditions. While working with Stuart McNab at the UN children’s charity UNICEF, he co-developed the McNab–Nabarro growth chart — a simple tool that allowed field workers to identify severely undernourished children using only weight measurements. How long can humans live? All evidence points to a maximum of 125 years Junior Professor Chair in AI for Precision Medicine and Chronic Inflammatory Diseases The Inria Centre at the University of Lille invites outstand...