Ria is a interdisciplinary researcher and educator with 10+ years of experience in community-based disaster risk reduction, stakeholder engagement, and participatory research design. She received her PhD in Geography from the University of New Mexico and was a visiting student at the BSPL lab from 2021-2022. During her time in the lab and in graduate school, she worked on a comparative study between headwater dependent mountain river systems in northern New Mexico and Latin America.

She currently works as a postdoctoral scholar at Washington State University.