Dorothy Foote, MPH, is a Public Health Nutritionist based in Hanoi, Vietnam. With over 25 years of technical and managerial leadership experience in international nutrition programming across development and humanitarian contexts, she has held substantive roles with UNICEF, the World Food Programme, Helen Keller International, and the International Life Sciences Institute, and has collaborated with leading nutrition research institutions across Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the United States.

Dorothy Foote’s technical expertise covers infant and young child feeding (IYCF), wasting prevention and management, nutrition assessment, micronutrients and food fortification, nutrition in emergencies, multi-sectoral nutrition governance, and cross-sectoral policy integration linking nutrition with health, WASH, social protection, and early childhood development. Her recent consulting portfolio included technical support to UNICEF’s Asia Regional Office and Country Offices on the Child Nutrition Fund (CNF), contributing to the mobilization of $45 million in matched catalytic funding for maternal nutrition and child wasting programmes in Lao PDR, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Cambodia, and authoring the nutrition situation analysis and policy landscape review for UNICEF Vietnam’s 2027–2031 Country Programme, including advocacy for nutrition integration into the national social protection programme. As Nutrition Manager at UNICEF Mozambique (2019–2024), she led a nutrition portfolio of $7–10 million per year, guided a team of five to six specialists, drove evidence generation for programme innovation including a study on food-based management of moderate wasting, and piloting of geographic spatial sampling methodology for nutrition assessments.  She worked with the UNICEF Social Policy and Social Protection team to have nutrition defined as a transversal budget programme in the new government budget structure (2021), and to design and assess the impacts and lessons learned of nutrition-sensitive social protection. As Nutrition Specialist and Nutrition Security Programme Coordinator at UNICEF EAPRO (2011–2016), she led a five-year, 26.4 million Euro EU–UNICEF regional partnership on maternal and young child nutrition security across Bangladesh, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Nepal, and the Philippines, established the Asia UN Network for SUN, and led advocacy with the ASEAN Health Secretariat that produced the first regional reports on Nutrition Security in ASEAN (2016). Her earlier career includes senior roles at Helen Keller International Indonesia, ILSI in Washington D.C., and the Rollins School of Public Health’s Program Against Micronutrient Malnutrition in Zambia, Uganda, and Madagascar. She has authored and co-authored over 25 technical publications, peer-reviewed articles, policy documents, and conference presentations, including work in BMC Nutrition, Journal of Nutrition, and Sight and Life Magazine.

Dorothy Foote holds a Master of Public Health (MPH) from Emory University (1996) and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the College of William and Mary (1992). She is a native English speaker, with intermediate proficiency in Portuguese and Bahasa Indonesia, and basic proficiency in Spanish and French.