As Vice-President, Global Technical Services and Chief Technical Advisor at Nutrition International, Mandana oversees the technical quality of Nutrition International’s programming in 10 countries and leads a 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 doctor with a PhD in Nutrition Sciences from Cornell University and 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 technical advisor for nutrition to the Ministry of Health in Iran. As a global health and nutrition expert, she led several collaborative research projects, technical advisory groups, consultations, and publication series involving WHO, UNICEF and teams of academic authors. She has been a coauthor on various global guidance documents.