Manuel Franco

Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology at the Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid, with a joint appointment at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Principal investigator of the Heart Healthy Hoods project, a longitudinal investigation of how urban food and physical environments shape cardiovascular risk in Madrid neighborhoods.

Why he matters here

Franco is one of the small number of European academics whose empirical work makes the case that individual physiological outcomes are inseparable from the built and commercial environment in which biology has to operate. That framing is the natural bridge from the physiological rights argument to the food-sovereignty and right-to-food traditions on the other side of the resource.