Nancy Grimm

NANCY B. GRIMM is an ecosystem ecologist who studies the interactions of climate change, human activities, resilience, and biogeochemical processes in urban and stream ecosystems. In the urban realm, Grimm was founding director of the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-term Ecological Research program and co-directed the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network from 2015–2022. She now co-directs the international network of networks, NATURA (NATure-based solutions for Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene) and the graduate scholars network, Earth Systems Science for the Anthropocene (ESSA). Professor Grimm’s collaborative research in urban social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) centers on nature-based, technological, and governance solutions that can build resilience to a future with increased frequency and magnitude of extreme events. In streams, Grimm and her students and colleagues study how hydrologic and climatic variability influence ecosystem processes such as stream metabolism and nutrient dynamics, and more recently, the impacts of a novel desert disturbance (wildfire) on stream processes through hydrologic connectivity of upland to stream-riparian corridor. Along with her colleagues and students, Grimm has made >200 contributions to the scientific literature. Professor Grimm is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the Ecological Society of America, the Society for Freshwater Science. She is a past president of the Ecological Society of America and the North American Benthological Society (now Society for Freshwater Science), past program director for the U.S. National Science Foundation and senior scientist for the U.S. Global Change Research Program. She was lead author for two chapters of the third U.S. National Climate Assessment (2014), member of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Committee to Advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program, member of the Advisory Committee for the Australian CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, and Editor for the AGU journal, Earth’s Future, among many other editorial and advisory boards. Current service includes two NASEM committees and the International Scientific Committee for OneWater (France).