Elazar Tadesse

Dr. Elazar Tadesse is the Research Manager of the USAID-funded Feed the Future Ethiopia Community Nutrition Activity.  In this role, she leads the planning and implementation of the comprehensive baseline assessment and multisectoral research agenda. Her responsibilities include maintaining ethical standards for research studies, serving as the Institutional Review Board point-of-contact, managing research firms and consultants, supervising data collection and quality, analyzing results, and disseminating key findings to inform nutrition policy and program implementation. 

With over 20 years of experience, Dr. Elazar’s career spans clinical practice, academia, and public health research. She began her career as a nurse in Ethiopia and has since worked in areas of nutrition, maternal and child nutrition, and primary health care. Her academic journey includes a PhD in Public Health Nutrition from Uppsala University, where she focused on integrated community-based management of severe acute malnutrition in rural south Ethiopia. 

Prior to her current role, Dr. Elazar served as a Nutrition and Gender expert at AMREF Health Africa Italy, where she collaborated with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health to strengthen family planning programs in drought-prone and food insecure regions. From 2020 to 2022, she served as Senior Nutrition Researcher at the Ethiopian Public Health Institute. She has held several other leadership positions, including Vice President for Research and Community Services at Kotebe Metropolitan University (2016 to 2020), where she led strategic research initiatives and managed multiple research directorates and Chief Academic and Research Director at Wolaita Sodo University’s College of Health Sciences and Medicine. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, focusing on nutrition, maternal and child health, and public health interventions in Ethiopia.