Caroline Newkirk, MPH, CHES, CPH joined the Mississippi Public Health Institute in 2020 as the Evaluation Specialist on a number of projects. Her work is dedicated mostly to a federally-funded statewide opioid prevention and surveillance grant, through the Mississippi Department of Health and the Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) project, a federally-funded initiative in which MSPHI is collaborating with community partners on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to improve access to healthy foods to increase breastfeeding rates among African American women of childbearing age. Caroline is also an Adjunct Professor in the Public Health Technology Program at Itawamba Community College, teaching a number of public health courses in both the Fall and Spring semesters. She previously worked with the Mississippi State Department of Health’s Office of Preventive Health, where she served as Deputy Bureau Director of the Chronic Disease Bureau and Project Director of a youth obesity prevention research project in Head Start Centers. Caroline received her Masters in Public Health degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2008 and has been an active member of the Mississippi Public Health Association since 2013.