Dr. Lauren Ciszak, MD, MPH, is an attending physician in Comprehensive Addiction Medicine and Family Medicine at MaineHealth, Clinical Faculty at the MaineHealth Institute for Research, and Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. She also serves as faculty in the MaineHealth Addiction Medicine and Preventive Medicine Fellowships. Her clinical and academic work sits at the intersection of primary care, addiction medicine, and preventive medicine, with a focus on innovative, equity-driven models of care.

Dr. Ciszak’s research centers on Food Is Medicine (FIM) and nutrition-based interventions—including medically tailored meals, produce prescriptions, culinary medicine, and lifestyle medicine programs—to improve mental health, daily functioning, and substance use disorder outcomes. Her work explores how nutrition interventions can reduce stress, improve mood, support cognitive and emotional resilience, and address the social and biological factors that contribute to both mental health conditions and substance use disorders. She is particularly interested in how access to nourishing food and food-related skills can serve as stabilizing, recovery-supportive interventions for individuals and families experiencing nutrition insecurity.

Her scholarship emphasizes the integration of nutrition and lifestyle interventions into real-world clinical settings, particularly addiction treatment and behavioral health. By partnering with patients, families, and community organizations, Dr. Ciszak develops and evaluates scalable care models that bridge healthcare and community food resources. Her work advances research in an emerging and understudied area at the intersection of nutrition, mental health, and substance use, with the goal of transforming how food and lifestyle supports are incorporated into recovery-oriented systems of care.