Dr. Michele Polacsek is currently a Professor of Public Health and the Director of the Center for Excellence in Public Health at the University of New England, based in Portland, Maine. She earned an M.H.S. in 1989 and a Ph.D. in 1993 from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is currently leading a Department of Health and Human Services Administration-funded study to promote nutrition and socialization among low-income seniors in Westbrook, Maine. She is also currently serving as a co-investigator on two National Institute of Health (NIH)-funded studies, building evidence for nutrition policy using supermarket data. She focuses her research efforts in the following two key areas: the promotion of healthy food choices in the supermarket setting and protecting students from harmful food marketing in the educational setting.