As Vice-President, Research and Development and Chief Technical Advisor at Nutrition International, Mandana Arabi oversees the technical quality of Nutrition International’s programming in 10 countries, and leads a global team of experts to address the most challenging gaps in evidence and practice in order to improve nutrition, especially for vulnerable populations and those most in need, including adolescents girls, women, and young children.
Mandana is a trained medical doctor with a PhD in Nutrition Sciences from Cornell University. She has more than 15 years of experience in public health nutrition, designing, implementing and evaluating nutrition interventions in countries with a high burden of malnutrition.
She has also served as a nutrition advisor for UNICEF, Founding Executive Director of the Nutrition Institute at the New York Academy of Sciences, and the technical advisor for nutrition to the Ministry of Health in Iran. As a global health and nutrition expert, she has led several collaborative research projects, technical advisory groups, consultations, and publication series involving WHO, UNICEF and teams of academic authors. She has been a co-author on various global guidance documents including the UNICEF Nutrition Programming Guide, the WHO Indicators for Infant and Young Child Feeding, the Global Research Agenda for Nutrition, and the Special Issue on Integration of Nutrition and Early Childhood Development in the Journal of the New York Academy of Sciences.