•
PORTLAND, Maine

Michele Polacsek awarded $190,000 grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Healthy Eating Research program

Michele Polacsek, Ph.D., M.H.S., associate professor in the University of New England’s  School of Community and Population Health, was awarded a $190,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF) Healthy Eating Research program for a study which will begin on February 1, 2016 and run through July 31, 2017. Polacsek is the principal investigator for the study, which will assess the digital marketing of food and beverages in middle schools across the country to inform policy to restrict marketers' access to children in the school environment. 

Digital marketing is a very important and often overlooked aspect of school-based marketing. Many students receive targeted junk food and beverage advertisements on their smart phones, school-issued laptops and tablets at school. To date, researchers have found neither tools nor data to help inform the debate and policy development on digital marketing in school settings. To address this gap, Polacsek and her colleagues developed a survey to assess digital marketing in schools as part of a previous project funded by RWJF. In this new study, they aim to assess school digital marketing environments in a national sample of middle schools to shed light on how they may be improved. 

Liam O’Brien, Ph.D., associate professor of mathematics and statistics at Colby College, is the co-investigator. Other project partners include Market Decisions Research, a Maine-based survey research firm; Laura Nixon, M.P.H., and Pamela Mejia, M.P.H., with Berkeley Media Studies Group; Faith Boninger, Ph.D., and Alex Molnar, Ph.D., with the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Sabrina Adler, J.D., with Changelab Solutions.

About the University of New England

The University of New England is Maine’s largest independent university, with two beautiful coastal campuses in Maine, a one-of-a-kind study abroad campus in Tangier, Morocco, and an array of flexible, accredited online degrees. In an uncommonly welcoming and supportive community, we offer hands-on learning, empowering students to make a positive impact in a world full of challenges. The state’s top provider of health professionals, we are home to Maine’s only medical college, Maine’s only dental college, a variety of other interprofessionally aligned health care degree programs, as well as nationally recognized programs for marine science degrees, natural and social sciences degrees, arts and humanities degrees, and business degrees.