Nicole Kennard — Food, Place, and Belonging: From Global Visions to Local Sustainability
The Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP) at NYU Tandon welcomes you to attend a lecture by Nicole Kennard, Research Scientist II and Assistant Director for Community-Engaged Research at Georgia Tech’s Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS). This event, hosted as part of the Fall 2025 Research Seminar Series, will be held in Room 1201 at 370 Jay Street.
About the Lecture
How do we build food systems that can feed 10 billion people by 2050, adapt to climate change, and simultaneously reduce emissions from one of the world’s top contributing sectors? At the global scale, food system sustainability discussions often focus on production, efficiency, and climate mitigation to address this. The main questions becomes: “how can we produce more with less environmental cost?” Yet, at the local level, communities imagine and build food systems with far broader goals—strengthening cultural ties, preserving history, fostering belonging, and creating new connections between people and place.
In this talk, Dr. Nicole Kennard and will introduce global framings of food security and food system sustainability and contrast them with the diverse ways these issues take shape in local contexts. Janelle Paige Wright, Environmental Justice Programs Manager at the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, will then share how communities in Atlanta are building resilient food systems - cultivating vibrant urban agriculture spaces and food networks to overcome food insecurity and environmental injustices. Together, the speakers explore how sustainability is defined and who gets to define it across global to local scales.
About the Speakers
Dr. Nicole Kennard serves as the Assistant Director for Community-Engaged Research within Georgia Tech’s Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. She supports faculty across the university in building meaningful and co-creative research partnerships with local communities to address pressing sustainability and societal challenges. As Research Faculty at GT, Kennard also leads her own community-engaged research in sustainable food systems, focused in the Southeast U.S. She works toward building resilient, community-focused food systems and uplifting local agriculture, agroecology, and food sovereignty as solutions to the complex, intertwined challenges of food insecurity, climate change, and land degradation. She uses a combination of quantitative methods (lifecycle assessment, mapping, soil health and ecosystem service assessments) and qualitative methods (in-depth interviews) to support this systems-level research. She is currently working with local partners to build a food systems network map for the City of Atlanta.
Janelle Paige Wright is the Environmental Justice Programs Manager at the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, a nonprofit organization committed to stewarding watersheds and green spaces in Atlanta, Georgia. Wright considers herself a steward and advocate of connecting and keeping community identity and vibrancy in place in natural environments. She has a background in environmental science and city and regional planning. Her academic research and work have spanned the disciplines and practices of green infrastructure planning, environmental storytelling, community garden mapping, spatial analysis, and place-keeping across green space.
Visitor Information
This event will be held in Room 1201 at 370 Jay St. Please visit the NYU Tandon website for directions and a campus map. Advance registration through Luma is required for campus access at NYU for external guests.
About the Urban Science Research Seminar Series
The Center for Urban Science + Progress’s annual Research Seminar series features leading voices in the growing field of urban informatics examining real-world challenges facing cities and urban environments around the world. The Fall 2025 series is organized by Assistant Professors Graham Dove, Yuki Miura, Qi Sun, and Takahiro Yabe.