Mercedes de Onis

Article(s) published in the ECOG eBook:

• World Health Organization Reference Curves

Dr Mercedes de Onis is the Coordinator of the Growth Assessment and Surveillance Unit of the Department of Nutrition at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. She has worked at WHO since 1989 when she joined as a Scientist responsible for the technical area of child growth and nutritional surveillance. A graduate of the University Complutense of Medicine in Madrid, Dr de Onis completed training in public health and epidemiology at the School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University from 1984 to 1986. She then joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, USA, where she worked as a researcher and wrote her doctoral dissertation on fetal growth retardation. Soon after her arrival at WHO she initiated the work that culminated in the development of the WHO Child Growth Standards, currently used in 130+ countries, and has also developed growth curves for school-aged children and adolescents. Throughout her career she has been involved in numerous international projects in over 85 countries related to child growth and malnutrition, and has published extensively on the area.