Nancy Grimm
Regents Professor, School of Life Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University- Biography
Nancy B. Grimm studies the interaction of climate variation and change, human activities and ecosystems. Her interdisciplinary research in both urban and stream ecosystems has focused on disturbance, resilience and biogeochemical processes. The Grimm Lab studies how disturbances (such as flooding or drying) affect the structure and processes of desert streams, how chemical elements move through and cycle within both desert streams and cities, the effects of stormwater infrastructure on water and material movement across an urban landscape, and impacts of extreme events on urban social-ecological-technological systems and their infrastructure.
From 1997-2016, Professor Grimm directed the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program, a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the Phoenix metropolitan region. She currently co-directs a Sustainability Research Network focused on urban resilience to weather-related extreme events and an international network of networks, “Nature Based Solutions to Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene” (NATURA). She was president (2005-06) and is a fellow of the Ecological Society of America of and is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society for Freshwater Science. She is an elected member (2019) of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Professor Grimm is an editor of the AGU e-journal, Earth’s Future, a past program director for the U.S. National Science Foundation and senior scientist for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and a lead author for two chapters of the 2014 third U.S. National Climate Assessment. International and national advisory board service includes the Margalef Prize Selection Committee, the National Research Council’s Standing Committees to Advise the US Global Change Research Program and on Hydrological Sciences, and the Advisory Committee for the Australian CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, among many others.