Dr. Catherine Brinkley is a cross-disciplinary thinker, with a One Health approach to food studies through her expertise in city and regional planning (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) and veterinary medicine (VMD, University of Pennsylvania). The Urban Planning background gives her research a focus on place-based policies and interventions. The veterinary training underpins a whole systems approach, considering health shared among humans, animals and the environment. Food is at the crux of these systems. As such, her research is primarily focused on integrating agricultural ecosystems services with urban areas.
I have developed several lines of inquiry investigating value-added agricultural networks which create opportunities, such as local food security and peri-urban on-farm clean energy solutions. I am currently mapping local food sales and value-added farm amenities to end users, generating a rural-urban integration land-use model, which is tested nationally through multivariate spatial regression in GIS. I connect this regional work with local field work on fresh food access and cost in low-income neighborhoods.
