Avery Bick

Bio

Avery Bick is the Sustainable and Humane Food Systems Research Fellow at Stanford's Climate & Energy Policy Program (CEPP). He has spent his career working on the multifaceted socio-environmental challenges facing our planet and society. He studied undergraduate environmental engineering at SUNY Buffalo, focusing on bioremediation of nitrate and toxic metals. He then worked for engineering consulting firm CH2M in New York City, where he testes and analyzed the effectiveness of nitrogen removal technologies at the City's wastewater treatment plants.

During his M.S. in Environmental Engineering & Science at Stanford, Avery shifted focus to the use of geospatial analysis techniques to study disaster risk and socioeconomic inequity, finding that GIS provided a mechanism for both effective scientific analysis and visual storytelling. This geospatial focus continued during his PhD at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, performed in Oslo and Trondheim, Norway. While in Norway, Avery was helped lead the installation of a national-scale acoustic monitoring system, which was used to monitor bird biodiversity and migration timings at high spatiotemporal resolutions.

Avery has authored and contributed to publications and white papers on a variety of topics, including acoustic ecological monitoring, socioeconomic inequities in flood risk, wildfire risk to electrical utilities, and extension of scientific data into art. Overall, he believes deeply in the ability of data and research to elucidate socio-environmental issues. However, he also recognizes that scientific knowledge is often not well integrated into policy. Thus, he works closely with legal and policy experts at his current CEPP fellowship to create focused, impactful research on environmental and health impacts of our agricultural systems, as well as regulatory gaps, particularly within California.

Academic Appointments

• Academic Fellow - Law, Environmental & Natural Resources Law & Policy Program (ENRLP)