Senior Nutrition Researcher

Summary

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.

The role

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, 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 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.

About you

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 experience could include: research roles (e.g. clinical nutrition research; epidemiological or health economics modeling), program roles (e.g. design and implementation, or monitoring and evaluation); funding roles (e.g. grantmaking or impact investing); or other roles in public sector, private sector or non-profit organizations that save and improve lives by addressing malnutrition.

We expect that people with the soft qualities below will be the most successful and happy on our team. This isn’t a full list, but hopefully it conveys the gist of our team’s professional personality:

• GiveWay’s mission and methods are personally energizing—you like our approach to research and you find personal meaning in our story of impact.
• You’re abnormally curious—you ask lots of questions, and you’re willing to interrogate others’ work. Your curiosity also extends to your own work—you aren’t defensive when your research comes under scrutiny.
• You routinely think about and surface the value judgments, background knowledge, and strategic commitments that undergird your work. You understand the potential effects of mistaken mental models, so you strive to improve yours and your team’s.
• You dislike it when people express strong confidence in views that don’t seem to rely on commensurate evidence. You carefully and legibly communicate about your confidence levels.
• You appreciate the value of an excellent reputation and strong relationships. You can moderate your directness and intensity when you’re communicating with external folks.
• You love a gnarly problem. You figure out the most important questions to answer, go deep on the detai