Deanna Olney has a Ph.D. in Nutritional Biology from the University of California Davis with a designated emphasis in International Nutrition and minors in Statistics and Epidemiology. Currently, Deanna is a Senior Research Fellow and a theme co-leader for Nutrition-Sensitive Programs in IFPRI’s Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division. She has co-led a number of comprehensive evaluations of nutrition-sensitive programs to examine what impacts integrated programs have on maternal and child health, nutrition, and well-being outcomes, how impacts are achieved, and in some cases, at what cost. These evaluations have all used process evaluations to identify ways to improve program delivery and utilization during ongoing programs and to inform future programming.
Deanna has had experience in gender research through her participation in the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project (GAAP) project, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) which led to a number of publications examining the impact of HKI’s EHFP program on maternal nutrition and empowerment, maternal ownership and control over assets and animals, and pathways through which maternal empowerment influences children’s nutritional status. She also has expertise in early childhood development and has experience in quantitative and qualitative methods, including some in the use of causal mediation methods to understand pathways of impact. She has worked in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Tanzania, Cambodia, Guatemala, and El Salvador.