Catherine Brinkley

Member, Environmental Health Sciences Center

Dr. Catherine Brinkley is a Faculty Director at the Center for Regional Change & Community and Associate Professor in Human Ecology, Community and Regional Development. Her research focuses on health and design such as healthy food systems, local government planning and decision-making, and sustainable development. 

Her lab group, Environment, Land and Food Systems (ELFS) studies how place influences health. They especially focus on community planning efforts and have a strong policy focus to measure what matters to communities.

Positions at UC Davis

  • Faculty Director & Associate Professor, Center for Regional Change & Community and Regional Development
  • Principal Investigator, ELFS Lab

Areas of Expertise

  • Planning for Healthy Communities
  • Food Security: healthy food access, diet-related health, land-use planning
  • Sustainable development

Major Research Papers

Stein, A. and Brinkley, C. (2023). Farm to Food Bank: Exploring the Ties between Local Food Producers and Charitable Food Assistance. Rural Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12489

Brinkley, C. Wagner, J (2022) Who is Planning for Environmental Justice and How? Journal of the American Planning Association. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2022.2118155

Darwalla, T.; Fuchs-Chesney, J. Raj, S. Brinkley, C. (2022) All Roads Lead to the Farmers Market?: Using Network Analysis to measure the orientation and central actors in a Community Food System through a Case Comparison of Yolo and Sacramento County, California. Journal of Agriculture and Human Values

McManamay, R. Turner, S. Vernon, C., Rice, J.; Raj, S and Brinkley, C. (2022). Urban land teleconnections in the United States: a graphical network approach. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2022.101822

Raj, S and Brinkley, C., Ulimwengu, J. (2022). Connected and extracted: Understanding how centrality in the global wheat supply chain affects global hunger using a network approach. PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269891

Education and Degree(s)
  • B.A., Biology and Russian Area Studies. Wellesley College
  • M.S., Virology. Göteborg University, Sweden
  • Ph.D., City and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania
  • Veterinary Medical Degree, University of Pennsylvania
Honors and Awards
  • Watson Fellowship (2004)
  • American Fulbright Fellowship (2005)
  • American Veterinary Medical Association, Policy Advocacy Internship on Capitol Hill (2014)
  • National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity Fellow (2017)