Rate My Professor Michael Lowe

Michael R. Lowe, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Drexel University. He received his PhD in Clinical Psychology from Boston College in 1979, an MS in Psychology from Drexel University in 1976, and a BS in Psychology from Boston University in 1973 (magna cum laude). Following his doctorate, he completed a clinical psychology internship at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School (1977-1978) and an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis (1978-1980). Lowe's academic career includes positions as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University (1980-1987) and Assistant Professor in the Section of General Internal Medicine at Temple University School of Medicine (1987-1989), Associate Professor at MCP Hahnemann University (1989-1996), and his current role at Drexel since 1997.

Lowe's research specializes in the biobehavioral aspects of eating and weight regulation, including obesity, eating disorders, dieting, hedonic hunger, weight suppression, and weight variability. He developed the Power of Food Scale, a validated measure of hedonic hunger employed in hundreds of studies worldwide and clinical trials by pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Novo Nordisk. As principal or co-investigator on multiple NIH grants exceeding $10 million in funding, including the POWERS study (2021-2026), he investigates physiological and behavioral factors in weight regain and eating disorders. Lowe has consulted for Weight Watchers and the Renfrew Center. Notable publications include "Describing the weight-reduced state: Physiology, behavior, and interventions" (Aronne et al., 2021, Obesity), "The effect of weight suppression on eating behavior" (Chen et al., 2022, Appetite), and "Hedonic hunger prospectively predicts ... loss of control eating" (Lowe et al., 2016, Health Psychology). His work has profoundly influenced the field by reevaluating dieting efficacy and self-regulation treatments.