Melissa Metrick was the garden manager at Roberta’s, a popular farm-to-table restaurant dishing out wood-fired pizzas in Brooklyn. As garden manager, she designed and created the on-site kitchen garden, which is also used to educate the chefs and guests in how to grow food sustainably within a city environment. A graduate of the master’s program in Food Studies, Metrick was instrumental in establishing the NYU Urban Farm Lab, an educational greenspace located right on the university’s campus. Here, she teaches a hands-on Urban Agriculture class, where students have the opportunity to partake in crop planning, harvesting, and implementing sustainable urban agriculture practices. Metrick has upwards of a decade of experience in urban agriculture, from volunteering with Americorps to working at a school garden in South Berkeley to teaching children how to grow food at the Ruthe Howe Family Garden at the New York Botanical Gardens. She also holds a Horticultural Certificate from Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.