Gabriela Burgos

Gabriela is a Senior Researcher at International Potato Center and head of the Quality and Nutrition Laboratory. Since 2004, she has participated at or led CIP’s projects focused on reduce malnutrition in Africa, Asia and Latin America through the improvement of the amount of beta-carotene, iron and zinc in potato and sweetpotato. She has significantly contributed to achieve genetic gains for iron and zinc contents in International Potato Center (CIP) breeding programs and to gain insight about bioaccessibility and bioavailability of nutrients in potato-based diets. She has also contributed to build substantial capacity in Ghana, Mozambique, Bangladesh, Rwanda and Ethiopia, in order to implement laboratories that perform nutrient evaluation of potato and sweetpotato. From 2008 to 2020, she participated of the “Potato Biofortification” project, funded by Harvest Plus and of the “Potato Population Improvement” project financed by the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas and USAID, where she led the targeting of potato biofortification to human populations under the risk of malnutrition, and the evaluation of iron and zinc in potato samples from improved biofortified potato breeding populations. Since 2018, Gabriela is leading efforts to have evidence of the high contribution of potato to reduce malnutrition through a very strong collaboration with experts from ETH-Zurich, the Nutritional Research Institute in Peru and University of East Anglia in UK. She led the USAID sub-project titled “Evaluation of iron bioavailability in humans” and CIP contribution in the project “Evaluating iron and zinc bioavailability from biofortified potatoes to reduce malnutrition in the Andean highlands”, funded by the BBSRC – GCRF donor. She is currently leading CIP contribution to the project “Effect of altitude on the absorption of potato iron in women’’ financed by ETH through the University of Applied Sciences of South Switzerland. She is author and coauthor of more than 20 scientific papers in ISI journals and the leading author of a book chapter about “the Contribution of Potato to the Diet and Health.