Caroline Skirrow

Chief of Operations for SISN, Caroline Skirrow, is responsible for managing all SISN’s operations including finance, legal, regulatory, HR, IT, third-party suppliers, consultants and volunteers. She also co-ordinates/convenes the Board and its various working groups. With over 30 years business, marketing and communications experience from a variety of blue-chip organisations (including Time Inc, Forbes, the Financial Times), she has brought a high-level of sophistication to SISN’s operations and has introduced processes and efficiencies to maximize productivity from a very small team, with the focus on outputs, rather than administrative burden.

Prior to becoming Chief of Operations Caroline was SISN Communications Manager and instrumental in development of all SISN’s outward face (including the web, social media, webinars, newsletter). She continues to give oversight to these activities.

Caroline has BScs in Psychology and Nutrition and is a Registered Nutritional Therapist, with a passion for all things food and health related. Whilst highly organized and logical, she is also creative and adventurous. A keen traveller, ceramicist and gardener she loves spending time in nature and can regularly be found, binoculars (or camera) in hand, searching for wildlife in the hills of Scotland.

Ariane Escritt is a Brazilian national with a degree in Business Administration and extensive experience in managing virtual organizations. She started her career as Executive Assistant to c-level executives in multinational corporations in Brazil and at the moment she provides administrative, technical and creative services remotely from her home in the UK, where she is currently based. She is also multi-lingual and her mother tongue is Portuguese, but she is also fluent in English and also conversant in French and Spanish.

Dr. Edward Frongillo

Professor Edward Frongillo conducts research globally to learn how to improve the growth, development, feeding, care, and survival of infants and young children. He leads research on the measurement, determinants, and consequences of household, adult, and child food insecurity. His research program also aims to understand how to advance policy and programs for improving nutrition and development. His contributions to science and public health have been particularly in five topics: child malnutrition and survival; infant and young child feeding, growth, and development; assessment of household and child food insecurity; detrimental effects of food insecurity on children; and advancement of nutrition policy in low- and middle-income countries.

He has expertise in validation of measures and indicators, evaluation of policies and programs, and design and analysis of longitudinal and evaluation studies. He founded and directed for 23 years the Cornell University Office of Statistical Consulting. He contributed to the design of several large and influential longitudinal studies including the World Health Organization Multicentre Growth Reference Study, the Maternal and Infant Nutrition Interventions in Matlab study of food and multiple micronutrient supplementation and breastfeeding counseling in Bangladesh, and the Healthy Communities Study of obesity prevention in children in the U.S. Heis part of the evaluation team for Alive & Thrive funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and helps lead the Drivers of Food Choice Grant Program at the University of South Carolina funded by the Foundation and UKAID-DFID. He has worked extensively with WHO, UNICEF, FAO, World Bank, USAID, IFPRI, FHI360, and other organizations.

He holds MS and PhD degrees in Biometry and an MS degree in Human Nutrition and Human Development from Cornell University. He is director of Global Health Initiatives in the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina.

Dr. Margaret Bentley

Margaret (Peggy) Bentley is the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Nutrition and past Associate Dean for Global Health in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She completed her MA and PhD degrees in Medical Anthropology from the University of Connecticut. She was on faculty in International Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University and joined the University of North Carolina in 1998. Dr. Bentley’s research focuses on women and infant’s nutrition, infant and young child feeding, behavioral research on HIV and nutrition, and community-based interventions for nutrition and health. She has worked both globally and locally, particularly on infant and young child feeding research. She has expertise in ethnographic, qualitative, and mixed-methods research methods and the application of these for program development and evaluation. She led a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded intervention to improve child growth and development in Andhra Pradesh, India and currently leads an NIH-funded behavioral intervention trial in North Carolina for prevention of obesity among infants and toddlers. She was Principal Investigator of a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant for analyses of nutrition data from the Breastfeeding, Antiretroviral and Nutrition (BAN) study. She was founding Chair of the Board of Directors of the Triangle Global Health Consortium and is Treasurer of the Consortium for Universities in Global Health. She is the UNC Faculty Director of the Duke-UNC Rotary Peace Fellows Center. In 2016, Dr. Bentley received the American Society of Nutrition Kellogg International Nutrition Award and the Bernard G. Greenberg Alumni Endowment Award, presented for excellence in teaching, research and service. In 2017, she was the recipient of the Triangle Global Health Global Health Champion Award, and in 2020 became an American Society of Nutrition Fellow.

Dr. Rebecca Heidkamp

Rebecca Heidkamp has been a faculty member in the Center for Human Nutrition in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health since 2013. She currently leads DataDENT – a multi-partner initiative focused on strengthening data value chains for nutrition – and sits on the WHO-UNICEF Technical Expert Advisory Group for Nutrition Monitoring. She has been involved in a number of research and training initiatives related to strengthening data-to-food & nutrition policy connections in sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Rebecca spent a decade working in the NGO sector in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. Rebecca holds a PhD in Nutritional Sciences from Cornell University.

Dr. Megan Bourassa

Dr. Mdu Mbuya

Mduduzi NN Mbuya is a Zimbabwean national who has worked since 1999 on nutrition program design and evaluation, health systems strengthening, surveillance, and operations/implementation research. He is particularly interested in understanding the drivers and deterrents of successful public health interventions in three domains – design, delivery/implementation and uptake/compliance – and leveraging this understanding for program improvement. He is currently Senior Technical Specialist: Knowledge Leadership at the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). In this role, he is involved in the development and operationalization of implementation research questions relevant to GAIN’s strategic programming areas, with particular emphasis on large scale food fortification. Prior to joining GAIN, Dr. Mbuya was an Associate Director with the Zvitambo Institute for Maternal and Child Health Research in Zimbabwe and a co-investigator in a cluster randomized study; the Sanitation/Hygiene Infant Nutrition Efficacy (SHINE) trial. In these roles, he led the design of nutrition specific and nutrition sensitive interventions, and concurrently, the development of process evaluation methods. The latter involved the use of implementation science methods and their incorporation into the organizational structure – forming an Implementation Science unit. Dr. Mbuya maintains research and teaching roles through collaborations with Cornell University, where he holds a courtesy assistant professor position, respectively. Dr. Mbuya holds a Doctorate degree in International Nutrition from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Nutrition from the University of Zimbabwe.

Dr. Chowdhury Jalal

Chowdhury Jalal joined Nutrition International (NI) in 2010 and is currently serving as the Senior Technical Advisor, Evaluations and Strategic Research. In his role, he supports planning, coordination, and quality assurance of the organizations’ evaluation and research projects; contributes to relevant policy, strategy, and guidelines; and supports evidence generation and dissemination of research findings. His research primarily focuses on implementation research (IR) including program design and process evaluations to better inform and improve implementation of NI programs. In addition, Jalal plays a key role in advancement of science in nutrition programming. In collaboration with external organizations and institutions, he contributes to the public knowledge base on best practices for nutrition programs and policy. Some of his most recent and innovative contributions include development of a method to systematically design integration of nutrition-sensitive and -specific interventions into multi-sector programs and supporting acceptability and efficacy trials of iron fortified red lentils, including scaling-up distribution and marketing. Jalal currently holds an adjunct professorship at the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, University of Saskatchewan. He is also an advisor to Hamutuk, a project integrating nutrition into government policies and the work of the private sector in East Timor, and Drivers of Food Choice, a competitive grant program to support new research on food choice managed by the University of South Carolina.

Before joining Nutrition International Jalal led the Nutrition Research Unit at BRAC, Bangladesh. He has expertise in community and international nutrition, program design and evaluation, operations research, carrying out large-scale surveys, and surveillance. He has a PhD in International Nutrition from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) from the University of Dhaka.

Dr. Purnima Menon

Shannon King

Shannon is the Implementation Science Manager at Vitamin Angels where she is supporting many implementation research activities aiming to improve the uptake and adherence to multiple micronutrient supplements for pregnant women. She completed her PhD and MSPH at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Human Nutrition program of the Department of International Health. Her graduate work focused on improving the delivery of nutrition interventions through the health system in LMICs.

Dr. Gretel Pelto

Dr. David Pelletier