Senior Nutrition Researcher

About the role

GiveWell is seeking a Senior Nutrition Researcher to help direct tens of millions of dollars annually to the most cost-effective nutrition interventions we can find. You will have an outsized influence on our funding decisions and help us save and improve lives on a global scale. Our nutrition grantmaking currently spans three sub-portfolios: Vitamin A Supplementation (VAS), iron supplementation (including iron and folic acid supplementation and large-scale food fortification), and treatment of acute malnutrition (CMAM/wasting treatment). In 2025, we directed $95 million to implementers across these areas, operating primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. We are actively deepening our work across all three areas, by scrutinising program coverage and quality, strengthening our cost-effectiveness models, considering different delivery platforms, and expanding our grantmaking to new geographies. We are also exploring opportunities to expand our grantmaking into interventions adjacent to our existing portfolios, as well as approaches and programs that are entirely new to GiveWell, where the evidence and cost-effectiveness case is compelling. As a Senior Nutrition Researcher, you'll create and lead ambitious research agendas related to our portfolios of work and answer complex questions that will inform GiveWell's grantmaking decisions. The researchers on our team combine rigorous evidence review, cost-effectiveness modeling, and thoughtful judgment. We're open to a wide variety of professional development pathways depending on your preferences and our needs. You will be joining a small grantmaking team to contribute to our ambitious research agenda on nutrition. You'll sift through the countless questions we could try to answer, and hone in on those that matter most. You'll also communicate externally about your work and mentor and advise other researchers on the team. You will shape a research agenda that brings rigor and creativity to the thorniest questions the GiveWell nutrition team faces. Your work will combine empirical evidence review and critical synthesis, cost-effectiveness modeling, discussions with subject matter experts, understanding of the broader context, and your own judgment. What you might work on in your first year: Tackle thorny research questions in our existing portfolios. For example: how should we calibrate our cost-effectiveness estimates to real-world program performance? How do we better understand coverage gaps and program quality across VAS, iron supplementation, and CMAM programs? How can we strengthen the evidence on the impact of VAS and CMAM in modern contexts, when many key trials are decades old but it would be unethical to withhold standard of care in new trials? Design and oversee learning grants. You'll help design impact evaluations for new and existing programs, and supervise researchers executing that work - from scoping the research question through to interpreting results and integrating them into our models. Build our evidence base in new programmatic areas. This includes synthesising existing research, commissioning new research, and in some cases funding primary data collection - with the goal of determining whether a new intervention meets GiveWell's cost-effectiveness bar and is ready for major grantmaking. Provide research support to grantmakers. You'll ensure our cost-effectiveness models reflect our best current understanding of the programs we fund, by stress-testing assumptions, incorporating new data, and flagging where uncertainty is high enough to warrant further investigation. The Senior Nutrition Researcher will help shape a major annual grantmaking portfolio, own grant investigations end-to-end (from research question through grant recommendation), and represent GiveWell to external counterparts. You'll have significant latitude to propose new areas of work. Team structure Our research department has over 60 people, and is currently organized into eight teams: Five of the teams (Livelihoods, Malaria, Nutrition, Vaccination, and Water) focus on specific areas of grantmaking. The New Areas team focuses on interventions in domains that are new to GiveWell. The Cross-Cutting team focuses on methodological issues, research quality, and other big-picture concerns that cut across all of our research work. The Commons team provides generalized research support to each of the other teams, including landscaping research, vetting, and publishing. Team values We think our research team has unique qualities: We care deeply and centrally about finding and sharing truth. Truth-seeking is one

Benefits

Additional Information

GiveWell is a research organization that identifies and funds cost-effective giving opportunities, focusing on global health and well-being. Our work is funded by tens of thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We've grown from directing $1.5 million in 2010 to directing more than $400 million in 2025.

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