Nancy B. Grimm

Biosketch

Nancy Grimm is Regents Professor and Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Ecology in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, where she currently leads a transdisciplinary graduate education initiative called Earth Systems Science for the Anthropocene. Her B.A. (1978) is from Hampshire College, and she earned her M.S. (1980) and Ph.D. (1985) from ASU. She is an affiliate of the School of Sustainability and adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico. She was founding co-director of the Central Arizona-Phoenix LTER and the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network and now directs the NATURA network of international networks. She was President and is fellow of the Ecological Society of America and the Society for Freshwater Science and is fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union (AGU). She has served as an NSF program director, a staff scientist and lead author for the third National Climate Assessment and is currently an editor of PNAS and AGU’s Perspectives in Earth and Space Sciences. She is a member of numerous national and international scientific advisory boards, and an author for United By Nature, the former 6th National Climate Assessment, and the Biodiversity and Climate Change Assessment for North America. She recently held a distinguished visiting lectureship at Yale School of the Environment and was awarded the Alfred C. Redfield Lifetime Achievement Award from ASLO and the Award of Excellence from the Society for Freshwater Science.

Research Interests

Grimm studies the interaction of climate variation and change, human activities, and ecosystems. Her long-term stream research focuses on how variability in the hydrologic regime affects the structure and processes of desert streams, especially wetland plant distribution, metabolism, nitrogen cycling, and hyporheic processes. More recently, she has investigated the impacts of desert fire on stream biogeochemistry. Her research in cities addresses how stormwater infrastructure affects water and material movement across an urban landscape. As the founding director of the interdisciplinary Central Arizona-Phoenix LTER program, she brought together earth, life, and social scientists to develop new frameworks for understanding urban social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). With the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, for which the SETS framing is central, Grimm and colleagues co-produced positive future visions and strategies to increase urban resilience in the face of extreme events. They worked with governmental and non-governmental organizations, academics, and community leaders to develop more than 50 unique scenarios. Grimm now co-leads a global network (NATURA) that brings together networks of researchers and practitioners who are developing nature-based solutions for urban resilience to climate change and extreme events.