Dr. Verónica Schoj Appointed New Vice President for Food and Nutrition Policy

The Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) is pleased to announce that Dr. Verónica Schoj (Vero) has been appointed to the role of Vice President for Food and Nutrition Policy effective April 1st. The appointment of Vero will enable GHAI to build strategic linkages between the food policy and cardiovascular health programs and strengthen our ability to advance policies that improve nutrition and health at scale.

Vero has been leading the Cardiovascular Health program at GHAI as a Senior Technical Advisor, working in close collaboration with Resolve to Save Lives and other partners. A physician with notable expertise on non-communicable disease (NCD) issues, policy advocacy and industry monitoring, Vero brings tremendous experience working with civil society organizations and in public service, previously serving as National Director of Health Promotion and NCD Control at the Ministry of Health of Argentina. A summary of her professional experience is below.

Claire Wingfield will continue as the Director of the Food Policy Program, leading GHAI’s efforts to catalyze healthy food policy solutions in over 15 countries around the world. Claire has provided exceptional leadership of the Food Policy Program, overseeing the expansion of GHAI’s Healthy Food Policy Advocacy Fund which provides critical support to help advance promising legislative or regulatory efforts in priority areas such as taxes on sugary beverages and/or ultra-processed food, front-of-package nutrition labeling, restrictions on marketing of unhealthy food and beverages and healthy public sector food environments, including schools.
GHAI will be conducting an open search for the Director for the Cardiovascular Health (CVH) program and the announcement of that recruitment is forthcoming. In the interim, Hema Khanchandani, the Associate Director of Advocacy, will continue to work closely with Vero to coordinate the work of the CVH team.

Dr. Verónica Schoj Bio

Dr. Verónica Schoj has 20 years of experience working on NCD issues, in both civil society and public administration. Most recently, she was the National Director of Health Promotion and NCD Control at the Ministry of Health of Argentina, where she was in charge of more than ten national programs, including nutrition and obesity prevention, tobacco control, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, among others. From 2007 to 2017, Dr. Schoj co-founded and served as Executive Director of the Interamerican Heart Foundation-Argentina (FIC Argentina), an NGO working on advocacy and research in non-communicable diseases. Previously, she was at the Family Medicine Department of the Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, where she coordinated the Tobacco Control Program and integrated the Obesity Program. Dr. Schoj is an author of more than 40 papers in peer-reviewed journals, was the project leader on more than ten competitive grants awarded by donors including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (CTFK), the National Institutes of Health, IDRC/Canada, and UNICEF. She is the recipient of multiple awards and distinctions, notably including: the Judy Wilkenfeld Award for Tobacco Control Excellence from CTFK in 2012; the distinction of the Observatory of the Right to Health of the School of Law of the University of Buenos Aires, for her contribution in the protection of the right to health in 2018; the Bloomberg Philanthropies Award for Global Tobacco Control granted to the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Treasury, and FIC Argentina in 2018 and Recognition of the Health Commission of the Senate-National Parliament of Argentina in 2019.

About the Global Health Advocacy Incubator

The Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) supports civil society organizations who advocate for public health policies that reduce death and disease. Now in our ninth year, GHAI draws on the successes and lessons learned in the fight against tobacco to improve public health around the globe. We help local partners strengthen their advocacy capacity and provide ongoing strategic and technical assistance as they design and execute advocacy campaigns to change policies that save lives across a variety of public health issues and in diverse political systems.