Tori Crisostomo-Rickman

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Tori Crisostomo-Rickman is a fourth-year undergraduate student researcher within the UCLA Geography Department, where she studies how people and places are shaped through interactions of the physical environment, macroeconomic systems, multiscalar governance and sociocultural forces. Similarly interdisciplinary, her research experience spans from community-partnered demographics with nonprofits Bet Tzedek, the Green Believers and the Gailen and Cathy Reevers Center (GCRC) for Community Empowerment to biophysical initiatives like an NSF assessment of California flowering times under changing climates and a GIS-analysis of Owens Valley watersheds. For her community-partnered research project, Tori will employ GIS and Community Partnered Participatory Research (CPPR) techniques to devise community-based solutions to fresh food disparities in South LA. With the support of her mentor, Dr. Arleen Brown, she will work alongside GCRC to conduct a spatial analysis of South LA food landscapes that interdependently assesses socioeconomic demography, urban infrastructure and existing resources, such as local markets or Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Her project will specifically utilize geospatial tools like ArcGIS and Google MyMap to visualize how factors like language, transportation and poverty impact communities’ access to fresh food. By using this intersectional narrative of food inequity, she strives to imagine changemaking solutions that are similarly multifaceted, such as spatial data-driven food drop routes or distributable maps of open food markets with public transportation routes to combat vehicle inaccessibility. Looking forward, Tori hopes to engage in such multi-scalar, hands-on work while researching environmental-society policy connectivities within a Public Policy PhD program. She seeks to conduct research that acknowledges how physical environments, lived community experiences and structural inequities are entwined. She aspires to imagine comprehensive policy solutions where justice for the natural environment and underserved communities can be jointly achieved.

Tori Crisostomo-Rickman is a fourth-year undergraduate student researcher within the UCLA Geography Department, where she studies how people and places are shaped through interactions of the physical environment, macroeconomic systems, multiscalar governance and sociocultural forces. Similarly interdisciplinary, her research experience spans from community-partnered demographics with nonprofits Bet Tzedek, the Green Believers and the Gailen and Cathy Reevers Center (GCRC) for Community Empowerment to biophysical initiatives like an NSF assessment of California flowering times under changing climates and a GIS-analysis of Owens Valley watersheds.

For her community-partnered research project, Tori will employ GIS and Community Partnered Participatory Research (CPPR) techniques to devise community-based solutions to fresh food disparities in South LA. With the support of her mentor, Dr. Arleen Brown, she will work alongside GCRC to conduct a spatial analysis of South LA food landscapes that interdependently assesses socioeconomic demography, urban infrastructure and existing resources, such as local markets or Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Her project will specifically utilize geospatial tools like ArcGIS and Google MyMap to visualize how factors like language, transportation and poverty impact communities’ access to fresh food. By using this intersectional narrative of food inequity, she strives to imagine changemaking solutions that are similarly multifaceted, such as spatial data-driven food drop routes or distributable maps of open food markets with public transportation routes to combat vehicle inaccessibility.

Looking forward, Tori hopes to engage in such multi-scalar, hands-on work while researching environmental-society policy connectivities within a Public Policy PhD program. She seeks to conduct research that acknowledges how physical environments, lived community experiences and structural inequities are entwined. She aspires to imagine comprehensive policy solutions where justice for the natural environment and underserved communities can be jointly achieved.