Louise O. Fresco is a Professor at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, specialized in the foundations of sustainable development in an international context. She was Assistant-Director-General of the Agriculture Department of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, Italy. She is a Distinguished Professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and holds a visiting professorship at the Institute of Earth Sciences, Stanford University, and at the David and Lucille Packard Foundation in Palo Alto, California (USA).

She is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry in Stockholm and a corresponding member of the Real Academia de Ingeniería in Madrid, Spain. She held the Cleveringa Chair at Leiden University, Netherlands, from 2005 to 2006. She was president of the Advisory Council for Research on Nature and Environment in the Netherlands. She was co-founder of the Land Use and Land Cover Change Project (LUCC) of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP). In May 2010 she was among the members of the InterAcademy Council’s international scientific team appointed by the United Nations to investigate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Prof. Fresco is a member of The Trilateral Commission and member of the Supervisory Board of Rabobank Nederland. She is a Crown Member of the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands (SER). She obtained her Ph.D. degree cum laude in Tropical Crop Science at Wageningen University in 1986.