Biography
Dr. Lesley Frank is a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Food, Health, and Social Justice at Acadia University. She researches in the areas of family poverty, food insecurity, maternal and infant health, infant feeding, and social policy. She has authored the Nova Scotia Child and Family Poverty Report Card for over 20 years, and is the author of Out of Milk: Infant Food Insecurity in a Rich Nation (UBC Press, 2020).
As a sociologist, she employs an interdisciplinary perspective to her work. She collaborates with scholars from the fields of nutrition, health, and public policy, along with community members, to advocate for the elimination of poverty and for food and health justice. Prior to her academic life, she worked as a community-based researcher and spent several years providing pre-natal services and support to families living in low-income circumstances in rural Nova Scotia.