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.

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.

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.

Academic Appointments

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

Contact

  • Academic
    averybick@stanford.edu
    University - Other Teaching/Research Department: Environmental & Natural Resources Law & Policy Program (ENRLP) Position: Sustainable and Humane Food Systems Data Science Fellow

Additional Info

Links

All Publications

  • Large- scale avian vocalization detection delivers reliable global biodiversity insights PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Sethi, S. S., Bick, A., Chen, M., Crouzeilles, R., Hillier, B. V., Lawson, J., Lee, C., Liu, S., Parruco, C., Rosten, C. M., Somveille, M., Tuanmu, M., Banks-Leite, C. 2024; 121 (33): e2420476121

    View details for DOI 10.1073/pnas.2315933121

    View details for Web of Science ID 001352410200004

    View details for PubMedID 39661057

    View details for PubMedCentralID PMC11665885

  • When floods hit the road: Resilience to flood-related traffic disruption in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Science advances Kasmalkar, I. G., Serafin, K. A., Miao, Y., Bick, I. A., Ortolano, L., Ouyang, D., Suckale, J. 2020; 6 (32): eaba2423

    Abstract

    As sea level rises, urban traffic networks in low-lying coastal areas face increasing risks of flood disruptions. Closure of flooded roads causes employee absences and delays, creating cascading impacts to communities. We integrate a traffic model with flood maps that represent potential combinations of storm surges, tides, seasonal cycles, interannual anomalies driven by large-scale climate variability such as the El Nino Southern Oscillation, and sea level rise. When identifying inundated roads, we propose corrections for potential biases arising from model integration. Our results for the San Francisco Bay Area show that employee absences are limited to the homes and workplaces within the areas of inundation, while delays propagate far inland. Communities with limited availability of alternate roads experience long delays irrespective of their proximity to the areas of inundation. We show that metric reach, a measure of road network density, is a better proxy for delays than flood exposure.

    View details for DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aba2423

    View details for PubMedID 32821823

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8007-9649