Senior Nutrition Researcher

Senior Nutrition Researcher

Give Well's mission is to help people in need as much as we can by researching the most cost-effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to the programs we believe will do the most good. Our work, which focuses on global health and well-being, 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. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we've been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find.

Give Well 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 Give Well, 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 Give Well'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.

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 Give Well.
• 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.

We think our research team has unique qualities:

• We care deeply and centrally about finding and sharing truth. Truth-seeking is one of our core values. We post our mistakes and we prize our team members who keep our culture of free-flowing feedback strong.
• We are independent. We focus 100% on finding the most cost-effective opportunities to save and improve lives. Our researchers assist in communicating our research findings to the public and our donors, and on occasion we provide tailored advice to ultra-high-net-worth donors who want to rely on our expertise to direct their giving—but we never ask our researchers to trade off against honesty, or to hide their real beliefs.
• We don't waste time. Once it's clear that a particular research question is unlikely to change our bottom-line funding recommendation, we drop it as quickly as possible. We encourage our research staff to constantly re-evaluate their portfolios and only work on the highest-priority questions.
• Lean research team = huge personal impact. In 2026, our research team of ~80 people is directing close to 1 billion dollars and we expect grantmaking dollars per research team member to increase in the future.
• We work well together. Our research team is lean because we're able to attract top-tier people, all of whom complete skills-based assessments before joining our staff. We maintain a high-performing, collegial culture and pay our staff accordingly.

We expect the Senior Nutrition Researcher to have:

• A quantitatively oriented advanced degree (e.g., in epidemiology, statistics, economics, public health, nutrition or related fields)
• Substantial professional experience relevant to nutrition. We interpret this broadly:
• The majority of our work to date has been nutrition programming delivered through the health sector, but we are also interested in other sectors (e.g. agriculture/food systems) that directly affect nutrition outcomes.
• Relevant professional…