From Practice to PhD: Why a Food-Systems Planner Returned to the Classroom

Riordan had grown up in Western New York, no stranger to the fields of corn, grapes, and other crops that ubiquitously inhabit its rural areas. Her mother worked as a food service director at a public school, a profession she’s now held for more than 30 years. “Growing up, I heard a lot about how challenging that work is in terms of getting food that kids want to eat but is also affordable,” she recalled.

After returning home from the rooftop farm, Riordan turned to the internet for answers and discovered the then-emerging field of food systems planning. “The more I read, the more excited I got,” she recalled. That curiosity led her to Cornell University’s Master of Regional Planning program, where she specialized in food systems planning. 

From there, Riordan built a career rooted in impact. She worked for a small food distributor in Philadelphia, helped farmers in the Hudson Valley understand and adopt sustainable growing practices, and later joined the City of Philadelphia, supporting efforts to procure high-quality, nutritious food for public programs like schools, summer initiatives, prisons, and homeless shelters.

“There’s a moral obligation to provide good nutrition, especially for people who haven’t chosen to be there,” she argued. “And it’s important to make sure the money that’s being spent isn’t feeding into the unjust systems that cause people to end up in some of those situations in the first place,” she argued. 

As her career progressed, Riordan found that working in an emerging field often meant forging a path where one hadn’t previously existed. “I’d learn everything I could, contribute everything I could, and then move onto the next thing,” she explained. But a persistent frustration followed her across roles: procurement processes move incredibly slowly. It takes even longer to develop big contracts and shift those contracts over time. “It’s a very slow way to change a system,” Riordan pointed out. “And I’m impatient.”

That impatience was also fueled by urgency. Climate change adaptation, political division, and rapid technology advancement are quickly changing the way we experience the world.  “The policies, programs, and systems that I’ve been working in—and that planners learn a lot about—are not flexible enough to meet that urgency,” she noted.

When these realizations came to her, she was working fulltime at The Center for Good Food Purchasing, a Berkeley-based nonprofit, managing a team of five. She found herself at a crossroads. One path led toward executive leadership within the nonprofit world. The other was less conventional: a self-described “midlife sabbatical” in the form of a doctoral program. This would give her time to investigate, learn, and reflect on ways to create meaningful systemic change. She chose the latter.

Several factors brought Riordan to the UB School of Architecture and Planning to pursue that lofty goal. She had previously collaborated on urban agriculture work with Dr. Samina Raja, SUNY Distinguished Professor, director of graduate studies in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, and director of the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab. Riordan recognized that Dr. Raja’s research, which is often geared toward practitioners, has greatly influenced and contributed to her own efforts throughout her career. And she knew Dr. Raja had a reputation of being deeply supportive of her students while also holding them to a high standard of rigor. That combination was exactly what she wanted.

On a personal level, the move also meant coming home. After leaving Buffalo in 2002, she had lived in Ithaca, New York City, Seattle, and Philadelphia. Returning to Buffalo—not just to visit, but to build a home as an adult—felt exciting and meaningful. “UB was the only choice in my head,” she realized.

When she entered the PhD program, Riordan was still working fulltime. But reflection—and experience—made it clear that in order to truly achieve her goals, she would need to fully commit. “It was important for me to recognize my own limits and then figure out how I’m going to make the most of this experience,” she shared. “It was time to invest in myself and not feel an obligation to the other things I had done previously. Though, admittedly, it’s hard for me to quit things that I really like.”

She needed time to build genuine connections with the people around her: fellow urban planning students, Food Lab staff, faculty, and other PhD students across the university. She credits UB’s Pathway to the PhD program for helping foster that sense of community and connecting her with a diverse array of doctoral students, all in the same boat but on uniquely different academic paths.

A highlight of her first year has been her role as graduate research assistant in the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab. She’s primarily been working on a project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is examining community food systems dashboards and developing guidelines for how to leverage those dashboards as tools to advance data equity for food equity. Her focus is on understanding how these tools have been developed and used by regional organizations, and identifying ways to promote dashboards that appropriately engage and represent the communities they’re depicting, work toward data-driven solutions, and are easily managed and updated. 

She explained, “It’s about developing an understanding and then communicating back to planners, policymakers, and other people who are using the data in this way, so they achieve both their goals and the community’s goals—but also without creating unintended consequences.”

Riordan encourages others at a similar point in their lives and careers to consider pursuing a PhD if they feel that pull. For her, the choice was rooted in having well-defined questions she wanted to explore and in recognizing that the structure of a doctoral program aligned well with the way she learns and works best. Mid-career experience, she believes, is an asset.

“You know how to get your work done, and you know how to manage your time and priorities. You know what’s important to you, which makes it easier to say yes or no. It makes it easier to dial in on your interests and get right to the point.”

And while she doesn’t yet have all the answers that she’s seeking, she’s closer to knowing how to find them. Learning how to write good research questions, better understanding planning theory, and creating bonds with supportive and intelligent mentors and colleagues have formed the backbone of a successful first year.

Looking back, she knows she wouldn’t have been ready for this moment any earlier. “It’s not the normal path,” she acknowledged. “But I’ve never taken the normal path.”