Marie-Sophie Whitney

Biography

Marie-Sophie Whitney is Action Against Hunger’s Senior Nutrition Advisor, having worked with the agency for the past 11 years. Ms. Whitney has managed humanitarian programs in a range of countries and contexts, and provided technical oversight from Action Against Hunger’s New York City headquarters as ACF’s Nutrition and Food Security Advisor and, later, as the organization’s Senior Nutrition Advisor.

Ms. Whitney began her career with ACF in July of 2000, working as a nurse-nutritionist in Burundi, northern Sudan, Ivory Coast, and Pakistan. Marie-Sophie then became a Nutrition Advisor in Action Against Hunger’s New York City headquarters, providing technical oversight for ACF’s lifesaving nutrition programs in D.R. Congo, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Chad, Pakistan and Tajikistan.

Ms. Whitney is widely recognized for her expertise in emergency nutrition and has collaborated on numerous articles, reports and technical papers, including the official guidelines for the Community-Based Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) produced in 2008 by the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance Project (FANTA). Ms. Whitney was asked to join the official working group overseeing revisions to the 2009 Sphere Standards Handbook, and she helped UNICEF and USAID coordinate pilot tests of the groundbreaking nutrition surveillance tool, the Standardized Monitoring and Assessment of Relief and Transitions (SMART) methodology—a tool developed to standardize nutritional assessments around the world.

A native of France, Ms. Whitney graduated from the Nice and Montpellier Sciences University, France with both a BS and MS degrees in population genetics and ecosystems. She holds a second MS in “Nutrition for Underdeveloped Countries” from the Montpellier Sciences University.