Molly Riordan is a food systems planning practitioner who pursues equitable regional approaches for building environmentally and socially responsible supply chains. For the last decade, she has explored how large demand centers of food, like cities and anchor institutions, can be levers for food systems transformation. 

Molly is the co-author of The Promise of Urban Agriculture: a National Study of Commercial Farming in Urban Areas (2019), a groundbreaking report that now includes a professional development course for planners offered through the Cornell Small Farms Program. She is the current chair of the American Planning Association Food Systems Division, and co-founder of the nonprofit Philly Cooks for Philly, an initiative to build a central kitchen for Philadelphia food programs. Most recently, Molly has also acted as program director at the Center for Good Food Purchasing, which supports large institutions to purchase more values-based foods.

 A Western New York native, Molly is returning to Buffalo to pursue a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning, with an interest in resident-led resource and data management for climate change resilience. She earned her master’s in regional planning at Cornell University, and her bachelor’s degree at Ithaca College.

Jane Dai (she/her) draws from multiple disciplines to understand how food systems—shaped by policy, systems, and environments—structure the environments where communities pursue health and well-being. She strives to approach research with a storytelling lens by applying mixed methods to an expansive definition of “data” that includes numbers, narratives, maps, and media. Her work and practice at the intersection of public health, urban planning, and public policy aims to leverage her role as a researcher to translate data and evaluation into equitable, affirming, and liberative strategies for community flourishing.

Jane’s research has focused on exploring cascading effects of racial capitalism in food systems and population health systems. She is particularly interested in how gentrification—alongside other processes related to uneven community development—influences where, when, and how people access food in urban and suburban contexts. Other longtime interests include commercial determinants of health, food decision-making contexts, and big data for public health nutrition. As a full-time human, Jane also enjoys spending her time outside or doing “analog” activities. You can find her dog-spotting on runs, drinking tea and reading, tinkering with sourdough pastries, puzzling, or convincing the neighborhood cat to accept chin scritches.

Olivia is a PhD student in Urban and Regional Planning at UB’s School of Architecture and Planning and a Presidential Fellow. Originally from Ghana, she earned her Master’s degree in Urban Planning from Minnesota State University, a Bachelor’s degree in Human Settlement Planning from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and a Graduate Certificate in GIS. Before coming to UB, she worked as the Community Development Coordinator for the City of Eagle Lake, Minnesota. Olivia is passionate about urban food systems and studies how land use policies can restrict urban agriculture. She also explores the ways food insecurity creates cognitive overload, influences decision-making, and leads to tunneling. At UB’s Food Lab, she is researching how food insecurity affects cognitive functioning on Buffalo’s East Side. In her spare time, she enjoys connecting with her family in Ghana and going to the gym.

Mohsin is a Fulbright award holder born and raised in Pakistan. He came to US in 2022 to pursue his PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from UB’s School of Architecture and Planning. Having a Master’s degree in Remote Sensing and GIS, he is passionate about spatial analysis and use of modern tools and technologies like GIS and Remote Sensing in issues related to poor planning and interventions. His research interests include climate change and mitigation, more specifically, urban heating and disparities in its impact distribution among different social groups.

At the food lab, Mohsin is involved in various projects, including building project dashboards and analyzing the food retail environment, as well as disparities associated with food retail distribution in Erie County. He is also part of the Data Equity for Food Equity (DEFE) project. Before joining UB, he worked as a GIS professional at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Pakistan, while also teaching GIS-related courses to undergraduate and graduate classes as a visiting faculty member at a public sector university in Pakistan. In his leisure time, he enjoys playing squash, badminton, and chess. He also likes hiking, kayaking, cycling, and reading.

Justin Kleppel is a graduate student at UB completing his Master’s in Public Health. Originally from New York City, Justin has a deep passion for cities and the health outcomes of those who live in them. Prior to his Master’s, Justin completed his undergraduate degree in Public Health at the University at Buffalo. He aspires to fix food insecurity and health inequalities at the root and believes planning is a tool to accomplish this. Outside of the Food Lab, Justin enjoys coffee and sports. He is also an athlete competing internationally in track & field, and bobsled.