Ellen Piwoz, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USA
Dr Ellen Piwoz is the Interim Deputy Director, Nutrition Lead for the nutrition team in the Family Health division of Global Health Program. She joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2007. Her work is predominantly focused on research and integrated strategies to improve nutrition in women and children. Ellen manages grants that span the Nutrition and MNCH portfolios, including research activities on maternal nutrition and fetal growth, developing and testing new products for home fortification of local foods (“lipid-based nutritional supplements”), and testing innovative models for delivering integrated breastfeeding-complementary feeding interventions at scale (the Alive & Thrive Initiative in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Vietnam). She is a member of the Nutrition, MNCH, and HIV Strategic Programme Teams.
Prior to joining the foundation in 2007, Ellen was the Director of the Center for Nutrition at the Academy for Educational Development in Washington, D.C. She also held faculty appointments in the Schools of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In these capacities, she directed the Sustainable Approaches to Nutrition in Africa Project, advised the US Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Africa and PEPFAR programs, and conducted research on nutrition, infant feeding, and HIV in Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa. She was a member the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Nutrition and HIV/AIDS and the Inter-agency Task Team for Prevention of Mother-to Child HIV Transmission. She was also an Elected Councilor of the Society for International Nutrition Research, American Society of Nutrition from 2002 to 2006.
Ellen has a Doctor of Science degree in Human Nutrition and a Master of Health Science degree in International Health from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health.
