One of the first things Professor Sabine O’Hara tells the doctoral students she mentors at UDC’s College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability and Environmental Sciences is: “When you work with me, you’re not here to just have your questions answered. You’re here to have your answers questioned.”
It is a fitting message from a longtime researcher whose career has been defined by boundless curiosity and a passion for challenging conventional wisdom.
O’Hara’s academic path began in agricultural economics, a field she describes as inherently interdisciplinary. Understanding how food is produced incorporates chemistry, biology, engineering, soil and plant science, water management and more. Agricultural economics further widens the lens, looking beyond food production to consider its larger purpose.
“Ultimately, what are we producing these food plants for?” O’Hara said. “To feed people.”
Pursuing that question drew her further into the social sciences and eventually into environmental and ecological economics. Along the way, the lens kept widening.
Today, O’Hara describes her work through the “nested systems” of the economy, society, culture and the natural world.
“I sometimes liken these systems to Russian matryoshka dolls,” she said. “The economy measures itself in dollars. But we know that when it comes to society and culture, money isn’t necessarily the best measure for well-being. Then when you bring in environmental sciences, you’re talking about climate, temperature, CO2 accumulation, healthy soils or not-so-healthy soils. These nested systems have very different measures and operate on different time scales, but all are connected when you’re considering their impact.”
For O’Hara, ecological economics starts with a simple premise: Economies are not forces of nature. They are human-made systems, shaped by political and cultural choices, with consequences for both people and the world around them.
“We determine how our economies run,” she said. “We do that through policies and legal frameworks. We do it through markets and other operational rules. And people and nature are affected by how we choose to run our economy.”
That perspective has shaped decades of research and established O’Hara as an internationally recognized scholar in ecological economics, urban food systems and sustainable development.
Building an Urban Model
When O’Hara arrived at UDC in 2012 as founding dean of CAUSES, she saw a unique opportunity.
“I remember feeling a bit like a kid in a candy shop,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘Wow, I get to build the field of urban agriculture here at UDC.’”
UDC’s distinction as the nation’s only exclusively urban land-grant university also prompted her to ask: What does a land-grant mission look like in a city like Washington, D.C.?
“It means small scale,” she said. “It isn’t traditional farming like you might see in the Midwest. Instead, it’s producing food in much smaller, sometimes unexpected places. From there, as an ecological economist, I began to think about circular food systems and how urban agriculture can look.”
One answer became UDC’s Urban Food Hubs model, built around four closely connected elements: food production, preparation, distribution, and waste and water management.
Her vision went well beyond growing vegetables in the District. If urban agriculture was going to improve health and food access, she realized, the entire system had to be considered, including how food is prepared, how it reaches people, whether it reflects their cultures and what happens to the resources used and the waste generated.
In her early work in District neighborhoods with limited access to fresh food, O’Hara and her colleagues quickly learned that simply bringing fresh produce into a community wasn’t nearly enough. Access had to be paired with education and with food that made sense within the lives and traditions of the people they hoped to serve.
“Food access alone isn’t going to do the trick,” O’Hara said. “We also have to say, ‘How do we help educate people?’ And we have to grow and offer people foods that are consistent with their own backgrounds and cultures.”
The lesson could be remarkably practical. Baby bok choy might be a favorite of local chefs, but she found it “didn’t really fly” in some neighborhoods where residents were unfamiliar with it. By contrast, older residents in Wards 7 and 8 immediately recognized collard greens that reminded them of meals their parents and grandparents had prepared.
This systems-level thinking shapes the questions she asks today. Food itself rarely fits neatly into a single academic discipline or government agency, a fact highlighted by one UDC-hosted conversation about Washington’s food system where O’Hara noted nearly 20 different agencies at the table.
“There is no D.C. Department of Agriculture,” she said. “At the municipal level, where does the food system fit? It’s workforce development. It’s infrastructure. It’s waste management. Food and water. Food and energy. Food and health.”
For O’Hara, those intersections are precisely where the interesting research questions begin.
Helping Students Find Their Own Voice
Her role at UDC has evolved along with those questions.
After leading CAUSES, O’Hara helped launch UDC’s Ph.D. program in urban leadership and entrepreneurship. Today, she is happy to devote more of her time to the work she has always considered central to who she is: “a researcher and mentor at heart.”
Much of her research now grows from conversations with her “fabulous Ph.D. students,” who bring their own experiences, cultures and areas of interest.
O’Hara brings decades of experience that can help students refine methodologies, narrow a question from “a lifetime worth of research” into a manageable dissertation and understand how scholarly publishing works.
“They bring their own ideas, and I can bring that toolbox, if you will,” she said. “Ph.D. dissertations are supposed to show not how you master a field, but how you are contributing new knowledge to it.”
What excites O’Hara most about mentorship is guiding students as they research topics and develop perspectives that are distinctly their own. “I always see my role as a mentor in helping them give voice to their ideas, rather than trying to shoehorn them into my own.”
After decades of scholarship, O’Hara still talks about research less as a body of answers than as an expanding field of possibilities.
“I’m a naturally curious person,” she said. “I won’t run out of new things to discover anytime soon.”