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 System Science for the Anthropocene. Her B.A. (1978) is from Hampshire College in Massachusetts, and she earned her M.S. (1980) and Ph.D. (1985) from ASU. She is an affiliate of the School of Sustainability and adjunct faculty at the University of New Mexico. She was founding co-director of the Central Arizona-Phoenix LTER and now co-directs the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network and the NATURA network of international networks that focuses on nature-based solutions for urban resilience. 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 AGU’s Earth’s Future. She is a member of NASEM?s Committee to Advise the US Global Change Research Program and Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability.

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. Her related 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). She currently co-directs the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, for which the SETS framing is central. In that project, she co-produces 'with governmental and non-governmental organizations, academics, and community leaders' positive future visions and strategies to increase urban resilience in the face of extreme events. She leads a new global initiative to bring together networks of researchers and practitioners who are developing nature-based solutions for urban resilience to climate change and extreme events.