Academic Rank

Research Associate

Department/Institute Affiliation(s)

Department of International Health

Faculty Member Profile

https://www.jhsph.edu/faculty/directory/profile/3833/shelley-m-walton

As a nutritionist and maternal and child health specialist, Shelley Walton has a portfolio focused on food security, humanitarian policy and practice, food assistance, wasting and stunting, infant and young child feeding, and implementation science. Her research aims to improve nutrition and health outcomes among populations in low resource settings. She has a strong interest in generating and translating evidence to impact stronger policies and programs to reach children, women, and adolescents more effectively. 

Over the past 10 years Shelley has contributed to the field of maternal and child nutrition in Africa and Asia. Before joining the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of International Health in 2019, she managed the USAID Food Aid Quality Review at Tufts University, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. While there, her work was underpinned by cost-effectiveness field research trials on malnutrition, food assistance design and implementation, humanitarian policy analysis, and translation of nutrition science to practice. As faculty at the JHSPH Institute for International Programs and Center for Human Nutrition, her projects focus on 1) providing evidence for advocacy, planning, and accountability to enhance reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, adolescent health & nutrition 2) improving methods, evidence, estimates, and programming to promote improved measurement of nutrition & MNCH intervention coverage.

She has worked closely with USAID (Office of Food for Peace, Bureau for Food Security and Bureau for Global Health), USDA (McGovern-Dole Food for Education), NIH, WFP, UNICEF, Global Financing Facility, The World Bank, non-governmental organizations, Ministries of Health, industry, and global academic partners. Shelley serves as the CORE Group’s Nutrition Working Group co-chair and along with the other co-chairs, she provides technical leadership and facilitate a group of nutrition practitioners, researchers, policy leaders, and funders to further the strategic development of standards, activities and products that will advance a joint technical nutrition agenda. 

Shelley is a Registered Dietitian and earned her BS in Nutrition Science from The Pennsylvania State University and her MPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.