Personen
Prof. Dr. Ina Danquah
Prof. Dr. Ina Danquah

Prof. Dr. Ina Danquah leads the working group Climate Change, Nutrition and Health at HIGH. Since Oct. 2023, she has been appointed as Hertz-Chair “Innovation for Planetary Health” & Director at the Center for Development Research (ZEF) at Bonn University


+49 6221 56-5086
+49 6221 56-5039

Medical/Professional background

2018 Habilitation in Epidemiology and Public Health, Institute for Social Medicine, Epidemiology and Health Economics, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin. Germany

2016 Master of Science (MSc) in Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), London, UK

2011 Doctor rerum medicinalium (Dr. rer. medic.) in Tropical Medicine, Institute of Tropical Medicine and International Health, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

2007 Master of Science in Nutrition Science (Dipl. Ern.-wiss.), Potsdam University, Potsdam Germany and University of Ghana, Legon-Accra, Ghana

Scientific background

Ina Danquah is a nutrition scientist who has specialized in epidemiology. For the past 10 years, her research focused on characterizing the dietary behavior of sub-Saharan African populations under transition, and establishing their diet-disease relationships, specifically for adiposity and metabolic health. In addition, Ina aims at determining the interrelations between all forms of malnutrition, infectious diseases and cardio-metabolic health among African populations in their country of origin and among African migrants in Europe. Importantly, Ina quantifies the sustainability of diets in rural and urban sub-Saharan Africa. These sustainability features comprise healthfulness, affordability, cultural acceptability, and climate-friendliness/climate-resilience.

Ina is a principal investigator within the DFG-funded Research Unit “Climate Change and Health in sub-Saharan Africa”. She has been a leading scientist for the work package “Nutrition” in the EU/FP7 project RODAM (Research on Obesity and Diabetes among African Migrants; www.rod-am.eu). Additionally, Ina has received funding from the Robert Bosch Foundation, the German Diabetes Foundation (DDS), the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the Leibniz Association. She has been awarded several prizes for her research, including the Early-Career Award by the Leibniz Kolleg Potsdam, the Nana Yaa Asantewaa Award for African-German Partnerships in Research, and the Ernst-Reuter Prize of the Free University Berlin.

Ina is affiliated with the German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbrücke (DIfE) and enjoys long-standing collaborations with Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi (Ghana) as well as Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

She has published more than 55 peer-reviewed articles, including Lancet, BMC Medicine, International Journal of Epidemiology, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and the European Journal of Nutrition. Her work has been cited over 1450 times; her h-index is 19, and her i10-index is 30.