About
A scholar working inside the system he studies.
I research food systems policy at UT Austin and spend the rest of my week in operations, strategy, and community work at Casa de Luz. The two halves aren't separate jobs — they're the same question asked in two registers.
Who I am
Humanities Honors, UT Austin
I'm a Humanities Honors scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, finishing a B.A. in Urban Studies in Spring 2027. The Humanities Honors Program lets a student design an interdisciplinary major around a single guiding question. Mine is about food: how it is grown, moved, funded, served, and understood — and what that does to the health of a civilisation.
I carry a 4.0 with University Honors every semester, Cum Laude Ampla et Magna and the Dean's Honor List, and in March 2026 I was named a Distinguished College Scholar — the top 4% of the College of Liberal Arts. My honors thesis, advised by Mark Budolfson, is titled Neotraditional Food Systems: A Framework for Global Food System Transformation.
- B.A. Urban Studies, 2027
- 4.0 GPA
- Distinguished College Scholar
- Thesis defence Spring 2027
What I'm doing
Roles and work
Four commitments, all pointed at the same problem from different angles: research, operations, institution-building, and organising.
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2024 — present
Casa de Luz — Management Team
In operations and strategy. Casa de Luz is a mixed-use wellness village in Austin built around a whole-food, plant-based dining hall. It was founded by my father, Eduardo Longoria; I work on the team that runs it. I oversee tenant operations for the permanent and short-term rental spaces, manage the Instagram account (grown to nearly 20,000 followers), rebuilt the accounting systems and migrated more than ten years of legacy financial data, and lead the clothing and merchandising strategy — worth roughly $5,000 a month in additional revenue.
It is also the place I'm studying. Working there is how I know the model holds up when the delivery is late, the margins are thin, and four hundred people still need dinner.
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2024 — present
Casa de Luz Foundation — Co-director
I helped design and establish a 501(c)(3) making the case for sustainable, communal dining as urban wellness infrastructure — not as charity, but as the kind of thing a city should fund on purpose. Through it I've collaborated with the City of Austin's Food Policy Manager on initiatives supporting the Austin Food Plan, and contributed to the successful nomination of Casa de Luz's founder for Austin's Net-Zero Hero award.
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2024 — present
Sweatcity Run Club — Founder
I started a wellness community that now draws events of 400+ people: running, sauna, cold plunge, CrossFit, yoga, and a shared meal afterwards. I handle safety, vendor coordination, and partnerships, and I speak at events on nutrition, movement, and building intentional community. We're the official host of the Austin Marathon Shakeout Run.
It's the most direct test I have of a simple claim: that people will show up for health when it's social, physical, and rooted in a real place.
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2024 — present
Allied Scholars for Animal Protection — Vice President, UT Austin
I organise weekly meetings and educational events on food justice and animal welfare, work with the UT Food Committee on campus dining policy, and lead planning for outreach and advocacy. Campus is a useful laboratory — a captive institutional food system with a student body willing to argue about it.
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Current
City of Austin Food Department — Intern
Building the case that funding a municipal food department is among the best-value decisions in a city budget, drawing on the EAT-Lancet Commission, the Austin–Travis County Food Plan, and municipal health data. This is where the theory meets an actual line item.
Why this matters
The argument, in four moves
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1
Food systems are broken.
Roughly a billion people are undernourished. Billions more are sick from diet-related disease. Agriculture already grows about twice the calories humanity needs — the system isn't failing at its goal, it's succeeding at the wrong one.
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2
A working alternative already exists.
Whole-food, plant-forward eating organised around community and place. It isn't speculative or novel; it's how most people ate for most of history, and it can be run at modern scale.
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3
Institutions are the barrier — not technology.
Subsidy structures, procurement rules, zoning, and the metrics we use to measure food access all hold the current system in place. Those barriers can be identified, quantified, and changed.
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4
So the question has changed.
My work is to prove the model operationally, model it economically, and name the specific shifts that would make it the default. The question isn't “can this work?” any more. It's “why aren't we doing this, and what exactly would make it happen?”
Background
The rest of it
Before UT I studied at the University of Colorado Boulder as an honors student at the Leeds School of Business — a B.S.B.A. in Management, Social Responsibility & Sustainability with a minor in Environmental Studies, 3.97 GPA and Dean's List every semester. I led the six-person team that won the Omni Interlocken case competition on workplace environment and employee retention, first out of more than 125 teams.
I've been a classical guitarist since childhood and have performed for audiences of 500 or more. I think about music roughly the way I think about food: something communal that we industrialised, and that wants to be communal again.
I'm also a triathlete — I raced Ironman Texas in 2026, and before that ranked among the top ten junior cross-country mountain bikers in Texas. I've eaten a whole-food, plant-based diet my entire life. That isn't the argument, but it is a data point I trust.
- Urbanism
- Sustainable food systems
- Experiential wellness
- Environmental ethics
- Public health communication
- Intermediate Spanish
Want the short version on paper?
My résumé has the full record of roles, honors, and awards.