From college essay to presidential advisor: Kristen Averyt honored with Early- to Mid-Career Alumni Award

Kristen Averyt, PhD ’05, has always been drawn to the places where science and policy intersect. Her professional path was anything but linear, but if you look back, there is a pattern: An intellectual tango, so to speak. Dipping into climate science here. Guiding drought policy there. Sliding back into the Earth sciences once again.

“From the start, I loved science,” she said, during a recent conversation. “But I wanted to work in the applied space, whether that was in policy, or decision-making, or community-based science.”

On Oct. 25, Averyt was honored with the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s 2024 Early- to Mid-Career Alumni Award, which recognizes individuals who have made highly significant, long-lasting contributions in the civil, government, business, or academic communities within 20 years of receiving their Stanford degrees.

At the award ceremony, Arun Majumdar, the school’s Chester Naramore Dean, spoke of Averyt’s ambition to enact meaningful change.

“Through it all,” he said, “one constant has remained – Kristen’s passion for connecting science to policy. Applied knowledge has been her hallmark, and with each endeavor she demonstrates the immense potential of science and knowledge to address the globe’s most pressing challenges.”

“Looking back fondly at her childhood,” Majumdar continued, “when her enduring love of science first sprouted, she describes herself as the kid who asked ‘why?’ and never stopped. And not only did she never stop asking ‘why?,’ but she invariably followed with, ‘So what do we do?’ The result has been national and global impact in climate science and policy.”

Her first love: the ocean

Averyt was born near the Atlantic Ocean in South Carolina and spent most of her childhood near the Pacific in Huntington Beach in southern California.

“I loved the water,” she said. “Our family trips were all about beaches, boats, lakes, wakeboarding, waterskiing, and being outside.”

Her grandparents, who also lived in southern California, took credit for Averyt falling in love with science, as they were the ones who thought to bring her to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in grade school. Somewhere between the rascally otters and the iridescent jellyfish, she became hooked on the wonder of the natural world.

“That spirit of adventure and asking questions is what drives a lot of us into science. That’s why we’re drawn to exploration, whether it’s going up in outer space or to the bottom of the ocean,” said Averyt, who applied to the astronaut program at NASA on a hopeful whim after completing her PhD in geological and environmental sciences. “It’s looking at the unknown and really trying to figure things out. I think they go hand in hand.”

At Stanford, her dissertation advisory committee once had a good chuckle about holding onto her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut. And when asked if she would fly to space today, she insisted, “Oh, absolutely, 100% – I mean, come on. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find people that wouldn’t, especially in the Earth science crowd.”

Earning a PhD also taught her how to ask questions, find the right experts, and be self-directed.

“Being at Stanford was a great path because it wasn’t just learning about Earth science. There was so much more that the university had to offer that you could take advantage of and pursue for yourself.”

For Averyt, her first experience attending the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Annual Meeting was one of those instances, back when she was a student. “The AGU was so formative at the beginning of my career,” she said. “When I was at Stanford, the AGU was always in San Francisco in the winter, and we would all pile onto the train, go for the day, and come back at night. We got no sleep.”

But she did get a lot of on-the-ground know-how that is serving her today in her new role there, which began in June of this year.

Under the mentorship of her advisor Dr. Adina Paytan, who is now a professor of Earth and planetary science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Averyt said she had the benefit of a strong female role model and a lab where most of the PhD students and postdoctoral fellows were women.

“I wanted to do something that wasn’t the traditional academic career path,” she reflected, “and Adina was really supportive of that.”

So, has Averyt used her expertise in paleoceanography since writing her PhD thesis? Nope. But she says she learned how to jump into new roles with vigor and with both feet, something she has done time and again.

A Nobel experience

One such instance came in Averyt's mid-20s. She had landed in Washington, DC, first working with the National Academies for Sciences and later as a legislative fellow for U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), contributing to policy on fisheries and energy, and sitting in on some of the original hearings about climate change before it became a partisan issue.

When she chanced upon an invitation to work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Boulder, Colorado, she weighed her options before deciding she wanted to change lanes.

The experience proved transformative for Averyt’s career trajectory, as she joined a team of a half-dozen scientists supporting Susan Solomon, the working group co-chair for the United States.

“I got thrown in the deep end, if you will, in a very good way,” she said. “My boss asked me if I could work on media and comms. I had zero experience, zero idea what I was doing, but I was like ‘Sure, absolutely. I’ll figure it out.’”

Shortly after the team completed the 2007 report, they learned the effort was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize, together with former vice president Al Gore. With low expectations, Averyt set her alarm for 3 a.m. on the big day to watch the announcement taking place live in Sweden – and then her jaw dropped.

“We won that prize, and it’s a big ‘WE,’ because there’s hundreds, thousands of people who were part of this report and have been involved with the IPCC since I happened to be there at that time,” she said. “One of the things that I’m particularly proud of, which people forget, is that the award was for communicating about climate change. It was not for the science. It was telling the story of the science.”

Or as one of her colleagues liked to put it: Al Gore did in a PowerPoint what it took the IPCC thousands of pages to do.

“I remind people that communication is really important if you want to do applied science. You need to go that extra step and learn how to tell the story of your science.”

Breaking glass ceilings

Last year, Averyt reached a milestone that, as a teenager, she had only dared to imagine. “The phrase, ‘If I could be science advisor to the president…,’ I believe was in my college application essay.”

In 2023, she was recruited from her role as senior climate advisor to the governor of Nevada to become the director for drought and Western resilience within the executive office of President Joe Biden at the Council on Environmental Quality. When asked how she has continued to step into ever more prominent positions of leadership, Averyt’s advice is simple, but not necessarily easy:

• Be nice to people.
• Be brave and try new things.
• Develop a network of peers and mentors.
• And, when in doubt, fly fishing can calm a busy mind.

“It can be a leap of faith, I’m not going to lie,” she said, speaking as someone whose latest role has her waking up at 4:30 a.m. to keep East Coast hours at her Nevada home. “As a woman who’s broken way too many glass ceilings, it hurts your head ultimately. It’s not the easiest thing in the world.”

She recalls situations in her life that took a negative, misogynistic turn when other people in the room chose to remain silent, experiences that convinced her that everyone needs allies. She’s therefore encouraged to see today’s students being taught the soft skills that she has spent decades learning by watching and doing.

“Be the person who stands up for others,” she said. “You can support women and people who are historically marginalized or underserved in the sciences or who aren’t the face that one might initially picture in that particular environment or in a particular role.”

Joining the AGU has given her a chance to step closer to science, to bridge back to policy, and to contribute to an organization she found so compelling as a doctoral student.

“The AGU strategic plan now includes not just discovery-based science, but has expanded its purview to look at applied science and science for solutions,” she said. “To be able to pay it forward is just a tremendous honor.”

Arun Majumdar is the Jay Precourt Professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and a professor of mechanical engineering, of energy science and engineering, of photon science, and, by courtesy, of materials science and engineering. He is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Simon Klemperer is a professor of geophysics and, by courtesy, of Earth and planetary sciences.

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