Jessica Escobar DeMarco, M.Sc., Ph.D., is a nutritionist-dietitian, and a scholar in global nutrition and public health with over 25 years of experience working across academia, government, and global health and nutrition settings. 

Dr. Escobar DeMarco is an Assistant Professor and Honors Faculty member in the Department of Public Health and Health Administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Roles include teaching, mentoring, service, research, and scholarly activities. Courses taught include the graduate courses Nutritional Assessment and Epidemiology, and Maternal and Child Health Systems, and the undergraduate course Foundations of Global Health. Her research focus is nutrition and food security across the life-course in the United States and globally. Recent work includes documenting food experiences with implications for food insecurity among students, and the association between food insecurity and suboptimal diets in college settings. Her interinstitutional collaborations have contributed to advancing knowledge on the transnational spillover effects of front-of-package nutrition labeling policies.

At the Alive & Thrive global nutrition initiative, managed by FHI 360, Dr. Escobar DeMarco contributed to joint efforts among the initiative and its strategic partners to conduct research, implement system strengthening interventions to integrate nutrition services in existing governmental platforms, and document how system strengthening for nutrition works. Accomplishments include contributing to documenting the process of developing models of maternal nutrition interventions integrated into antenatal care services in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and India, and the effects of COVID-19 on the provision and use of health and nutrition services and on food security in South Asia. 

Before joining Alive & Thrive, Dr. Escobar DeMarco conducted a case study aimed at examining the mechanisms that determine the sustainability of food and nutrition security policies during presidential transitions in Guatemala. She also contributed to global nutrition initiatives and research. She worked in El Salvador as a technical officer on nutrition for the United Nations World Food Programme and the Ministry of Health.