Andrew Wickert

Background & Expertise

Andy Wickert is associate professor of Earth-surface processes in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences and at the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory. He reconstructs how rivers, glaciers, and landscapes evolved over the past to simultaneously tell the story of the places we call home while building foundational data sets on Earth-surface change from geological to human time scales. Using these data sets as a testing ground, Wickert builds scientific theory – physics-grounded equations – and develops these into computational models to forecast how landscapes may evolve into the future under scenarios of changing climate and land use. Towards these goals, his laboratory develops open-source instrumentation for environmental monitoring. Wickert's group's work encompasses local-scale field studies in single watersheds alongside global-scale models of continental water systems and sea level. 

Wickert earned his SB at MIT and his PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder. He held a humboldt research fellowship at the GFZ Potsdam and is currently a global faculty member at the Unviersity of Cologne. He returned home to Minnesota in 2015 to work on the lands and waters that formed him.