Anne Palmer
Director of Practice
Anne Palmer is the Director of Practice at the Center, where she is part of a four-person leadership team that defines and guides the CLF's strategic direction. Her 20-year career at the Center has blended practice, research, and teaching.
In 2013, she launched CLF’s Food Policy Networks project, which sought to build the capacity of food policy councils and similar groups to advance food system policies at the state, local, regional, and tribal levels, significantly increasing connections among the 300+ food policy councils. The project has just successfully transitioned to its own entity with a new network director. Anne has led trainings and workshops, facilitated communities of practice, and hosted webinars and discussions. As a network leader, Anne has also developed relationships with organizations, funders, government agencies, and other universities across the country, building an extensive network of food policy experts. She has served on the Maryland Food System Resiliency Council and the Baltimore City Food Policy Task Force.
As a senior scientist in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society, she studies how multisector entities, such as food policy councils (FPCs), address complex public health challenges and promote public participation in policymaking. In addition, Anne has extensive expertise in food retail. As co-PI on a six-year, multidisciplinary, supply chain study, she led the food consumption team to investigate how customers decide where to shop and why. She was also co-PI on a supermarket study that examined how to shift customer purchasing patterns by altering the store environment, manipulating prices, and training staff.
She is currently focused on using systems thinking to address food system issues. For several years, she co-taught a Summer Institute course on applying systems thinking to obesity prevention and co-taught the Baltimore Food Systems course for four years.
Before joining CLF, she spent 13 years designing, developing, and implementing public health communication campaigns in Asia with the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs. She holds a master’s degree in international affairs from Ohio University and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and women’s studies from Saint Olaf College.