We caught up with Andrew Fricker to see what he has been up to since receiving his B.S. in Geography in 2005.
Why did you major in geography? What year did you get your undergrad?
I was originally a biology major, and organic chemistry was really hard and frankly a little uninteresting. A friend of mine recommended Geography 3A/B with Carl Sundbeck and I took both of these classes and loved them. Sundbeck is probably the reason I became a Geography major. After 3A/B Sundbeck told me to take “Remote Sensing” which I took and really enjoyed. I wanted to get a Geog BS degree, so I took Environmental Optics (w/ Dar Roberts), which was probably my hardest undergrad class, but I loved it too. I got an internship at Bren in Frank Davis’ Biogeography lab as a research assistant, but Biogeography was a really good way for me to blend my enthusiasm for biology and geography/landscape ecology. I graduated with a BS in 2005.
After UCSB I got a job at SDSU doing GIS for the Soil Ecology and Restoration Group doing habitat restoration in disturbed ecosystems around SoCal.
Then I moved to LA and got a job with a LiDAR company and worked in the private sector doing remote sensing for a (now defunct) company called Airborne 1 and another company called Geodigital International (based in Lompoc/Canada). While working for these companies, I got into grad school at UCLA. Towards the end of my grad school career, I got a research job at NASA-JPL and graduated with an MA in 2009 and PhD in 2015, both in Geography.
I subsequently did two postdocs at ASU and UCR, thanks to Frank Davis (Bren School, NCEAS and Geography) who was a co-advisor with Dr. Janet Franklin (also a UCSB Geography alum and National Academy Member). Earlier this year I was offered a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor position at Cal Poly SLO teaching Geography in the Social Sciences Department.
What classes will you be teaching at Cal Poly SLO?
This fall I’m teaching “Applications in Remote Sensing”, and I’ll be teaching a class called “Global Environment” in Winter and “Intro to GIS” in the Spring.
What are your current research interests?
I’ve blended my love of biology and geography. I study landscape ecology and forest ecology using Remote Sensing and GIS, particularly LiDAR and Hyperspectral remote sensing. I have a project in the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains and another project trying to model the distribution of critically endangered endemic birds on the island of Kauai. I’m currently trying to develop ‘deep learning’ algorithms which can be applied to geospatial imagery to improve the classification of tree species and habitat types.
Moving into the other side of academia, what would you tell your younger self?
I would tell my younger self to surf and socialize a little less, and push myself a little harder in the classroom. I pretty much learned to code in grad school, and I wish I would’ve learned Python and R earlier and really push my technical skills earlier in my academic career, because things are moving so fast now I feel like I’m perpetually behind on my tech skills. But other than that, my time at UCSB was very rewarding and I wouldn’t change a lot, the professors were amazing and so were my peers. UCSB Geography is “Where it’s at!”.
We’re happy to have you just up the coast from us, best wishes on your new position, Andrew!
