Roel Merckx
CGIAR Integrated Partnership Board, Chair, effective 1 January 2026.
Roel Merckx holds a PhD in Agricultural Sciences from the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven). Until he retired in October 2022, he was Professor in Soil Fertility at the Faculty of Bio-Science Engineering of KUL. At KUL he also held the position of Head of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and represented the University on the board of the VLIR-UDC (Flemish Interuniversity Council for University Development Cooperation). Before joining KUL, he was a research scientist at the Research Institute ITAL, Wageningen in the Netherlands, and a Visiting scientist to the C.S.I.R.O., Division of Soils, Adelaide, Australia.
Roel Merckx has supervised collaborative research projects with IITA since 1987 on balanced nutrient management systems for maize based farming systems and was a partner in the CIALCA (Consortium for Improving Agriculture-based Livelihoods in Central Africa) where IITA, Bioversity and TSBF-CIAT were the participating CGIAR centers.
At present he is an Emeritus Professor with specific assignments. He has served on several boards with either editorial or managing duties, the most relevant being the Board of Trustees of IITA, Ibadan, Nigeria (between 2011 and 2017) as Program Committee and subsequently Governance Committee Chair.
As a soil scientist, his main research interests have been focusing on the soil-to-plant transfer of nutrients and/or contaminants and the dynamics of soil organic matter. Over the years, this focus shifted to soil fertility problems in Sub-Saharan Africa.