Jerold R. Mande is Professor of the Practice, Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and a Senior Fellow, Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University. Mande joined the Tufts faculty in May 2017.
In addition to his faculty duties, Mande is leading an initiative on advocacy, food policy change, and public health impact. Mr. Mande understands the complex intersection of nutrition science and policy and that merely supplying people with the right nutrition information is not enough to ensure a healthy public. Far beyond issues of personal responsibility, real change in public health requires changing our food environment.
Mr. Mande brings a wealth of experience in public health, nutrition, and public policy to the job. In 2009 he was appointed by President Obama and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack as Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety, and after two years transitioned to focusing on reforming the national feeding programs. Mande brings prior academic experience as well. Before joining the Obama administration, he was the associate director for public policy at the Yale Cancer Center, and on the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. There, he devised a national model that leveraged state leadership to increase cancer prevention and control, including diet and cancer, and was affiliated faculty with the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Nutrition.
Earlier in his career, as senior advisor to the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, he helped shape national policy on nutrition, food safety, and tobacco and led the design of the Nutrition Facts label that now appears on virtually all packaged foods. Following his tenure at FDA, Mr. Mande served on the White House staff as a health policy advisor, working on food, cancer, and tobacco policy, and was deputy assistant secretary for occupational health at the Department of Labor. He began his career as a legislative assistant for Al Gore in the U.S. House and Senate, managing Gore's health and environment agenda, and helping Gore write the nation's organ donation and transplantation laws.
Mr. Mande earned a master's degree in public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an undergraduate degree in nutritional sciences from the University of Connecticut. He also completed the program for senior government managers at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Among his achievements is the Presidential Award for Design Excellence for his work on the Nutrition Facts food label.
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