At 34, Dr. Sahil Singh is India's youngest-ever IAEA scientific ambassador. His work using spirulina algae to address malnutrition in 12 countries has saved thousands of children — and.
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Dr. Sahil Singh, born in Ludhiana, Punjab in 1992, is a food scientist and nutritionist who in 2026 was appointed India's youngest-ever Scientific Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). His appointment recognises 10 years of field work developing cost-effective, community-scalable spirulina (blue-green algae) production systems for addressing acute malnutrition in low-resource settings. Spirulina has been consumed by humans for centuries — Aztec civilisations harvested it from Lake Texcoco; NASA studied it as a potential space food — but Singh's innovation was engineering an affordable community-scale cultivation system using locally available materials. His model — community spirulina cultivation tanks that can be run for ₹800 per month per 50-child feeding programme — has been deployed in 12 countries including Mali, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Ethiopia. Clinical trials published in The Lancet (2024) showed that his spirulina intervention reduced severe acute malnutrition rates by 38% in a 6-month period in three Malian provinces — results that prompted the IAEA to adopt the model for its technical cooperation programme across 18 member states.
Singh's path began with a personal encounter. In 2014, while completing his MSc in Food Technology at Punjab Agricultural University, he spent a summer volunteering with the Akshaya Patra Foundation's midday meal programme in rural Odisha. He saw children with the unmistakable signs of kwashiorkor (protein deficiency malnutrition) — swollen bellies, discoloured hair, listless eyes — despite receiving the government meal. His thesis question: what protein source could be produced locally, cheaply, and with enough density to meaningfully address the gap? Spirulina — a cyanobacterium that grows in alkaline water and contains 60-70% protein by dry weight, plus B12, iron, and essential amino acids — had been studied as a superfood in high-income markets but had seen almost no work on low-cost community production. Singh's PhD at IIT Delhi (2016-2020) focused entirely on designing a ₹1,500 production tank from locally available materials — including discarded plastic barrels and agricultural lime — that could grow sufficient spirulina for 50 children per day. The thesis included two field trials in Sonipat district schools in Haryana over 12 weeks each. Children receiving 5g of spirulina daily showed statistically significant improvement in hemoglobin and mid-upper arm circumference after 90 days. Cost-per-child-per-day worked out to ₹1.20 — roughly one-fifteenth of any comparable commercial supplement. These results convinced ICMR's Prof. Nandita Kapoor to sponsor Singh for a presentation at the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit pre-dialogue, where IAEA representatives first encountered his model and initiated the partnership that would take it to 12 countries.
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IAEA Nutritional and Health Related Environmental Studies section has been Singh's institutional partner since 2021, funding field deployments and providing isotopic tracing techniques to track nutrient absorption. Prof. Usha Ramakrishnan (Emory University) co-authored the Lancet RCT, providing the epidemiological credibility that turned field results into global policy evidence. UNICEF's Nutrition Division has endorsed the model for integration into CMAM (Community Management of Acute Malnutrition) programmes in 8 countries. Nandita Kapoor (former ICMR Director) mentored Singh during his early fieldwork, opening access to government nutrition programmes. Dr. Indra Nooyi (via the PepsiCo Foundation) has funded the 2025-27 scale-up of Singh's model in Bangladesh and Philippines. The Mali Ministry of Health was the first government adopter; Bangladesh's BRAC operates the largest deployment with 2,400 tanks. Government of India — Ministry of Science and Technology co-funded Singh's field deployments from 2022 under the national nutrition innovation scheme. WHO South-East Asia Regional Office added community spirulina cultivation to its model nutrition intervention toolkit in 2025, citing Singh's Bangladesh and Mali results. IIT Delhi School of Biological Sciences — where Singh is an adjunct professor — has produced an open-source curriculum for training tank operators, available in French, Bahasa Indonesia, Amharic, Bengali, and English.
34: Singh's age at IAEA Scientific Ambassador appointment — the youngest Indian ever. 12: countries where his model is deployed. 38%: reduction in severe acute malnutrition in the Mali RCT (Lancet 2024). ₹800: monthly cost of running a tank feeding 50 children, compared with $60-70 per child per month for Plumpy'Nut. ₹1,500: build cost of the production tank from locally sourced materials. 60-70%: protein content of spirulina by dry weight. 2,400: tanks operated under BRAC in Bangladesh. 600: children covered in the first Mali pilot in 2021. 18: IAEA member states slated for scale-up under his ambassadorship. 1 million: children dying annually worldwide from malnutrition — the size of the problem his model targets. 6 months: time to measurable nutritional improvement in trial cohorts. 1.20: cost in rupees per child per day — one-fifteenth of any commercial supplement. 5: grams of dried spirulina given per child per day in the standard protocol. 35: percentage of a child's daily protein requirement met by this dose alone.
In the Mali pilot's first 18 months, Singh's team tracked 600 children aged 6-59 months. Two-thirds entered the programme with moderate to severe acute malnutrition. After 6 months of daily spirulina supplementation, 78% had moved out of the SAM/MAM categories — and weight-for-height z-scores improved across the entire cohort. The change was visible in non-clinical ways too: school attendance in the four villages with active tanks rose 22% over the same period. In Bangladesh's char (river-island) communities — areas often cut off from formal supply chains for weeks at a time — local women now run the tanks as small cooperatives, earning ₹3,500-5,000 a month each from selling surplus spirulina to nearby markets. The dignity dimension matters: families are no longer recipients of imported food aid but operators of their own food source. Singh's team works with primary health centres to make sure tank operators are trained in basic clinical screening, which has improved early detection of other childhood illnesses. Testimony from Khadijatou Diallo, a tank operator in Kayes, Mali: her village lost three children to malnutrition in 2020; in 2022 and 2023, none died. In India, Singh has piloted the model in Jharkhand's Palamau district — one of the country's most persistently malnourished areas — with 40 tanks covering 2,000 children, now adopted as a state nutrition pilot by the Jharkhand government.
Singh's spirulina model challenges a structural assumption in global nutrition: that solving malnutrition requires industrial-scale solutions — fortified foods manufactured in facilities, distributed through formal supply chains, and imported to where they are needed. This model has worked in stable middle-income countries but consistently fails in conflict zones, remote rural areas, and places where supply chains break down for weeks at a time due to flooding, civil unrest, or simple distance from the nearest road. The Plumpy'Nut model — an industrially manufactured peanut-based therapeutic food — costs $60-70 per child per month and requires cold chain logistics that many of the world's most malnourished communities lack. Singh's ₹800 per month per 50-child tank inverts this entirely: it puts production capability in the hands of local communities, relies on sunlight and water rather than import chains, and creates local ownership. At a global level, malnutrition still kills approximately 1 million children per year — not because the solution is unknown but because the delivery model is broken. The long-term lesson: appropriate technology designed for the context it will actually be used in can outperform sophisticated imported solutions. Whether development institutions can absorb this lesson will shape the future of global child health for decades.
Chronology
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Singh observes kwashiorkor in children receiving government midday meals in a remote Odisha village. The contrast between official nutrition coverage and visible malnutrition prompts him to start researching protein-dense, affordable food sources that can be produced at the community level without dependence on supply chains.
IIT Delhi awards Singh his PhD in food technology; his ₹1,500 spirulina cultivation tank prototype has been tested in lab conditions and in two rural schools in Haryana. He files an Indian patent for the tank design. The patent is granted in 2022 and covers the low-cost alkaline medium formulation and the structural design using agricultural-grade materials.
Singh joins the IAEA's nutritional technical cooperation programme; the first 12 community spirulina tanks are deployed in Mali's Kayes region, one of the country's most food-insecure areas, covering 600 children aged 6-59 months. IAEA's isotopic tracing techniques are used alongside clinical measurements to track actual nutrient absorption in children.
UNICEF's Bangladesh country office runs a 200-tank pilot in river-island (char) communities in Mymensingh district, areas regularly cut off from formal supply chains. Local women are trained as tank operators. Within eight months, moderate acute malnutrition indicators in the target villages fall measurably, validating Singh's community-ownership model outside Africa.
Randomised controlled trial across three Malian provinces, co-authored with Prof. Usha Ramakrishnan of Emory University, is published in The Lancet — the world's highest-impact general medical journal. Results: 38% reduction in severe acute malnutrition in the intervention arm versus control. UNICEF cites the paper in a policy brief within six weeks of publication.
Singh is appointed India's Scientific Ambassador to the IAEA at age 34 — the youngest Indian ever in the role. The Vienna appointment ceremony is attended by the IAEA Director General and India's Minister of Science. His mandate: scale the community spirulina model to 18 IAEA member states across Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia by 2030.
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