Nancy Grimm

Regents Professor Nancy Grimm is the Virginia Ullman Professor of ecology in the School of Life Sciences. She studies the interaction of climate variation and change, human activities and ecosystems. She directed the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program, a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the Phoenix metropolitan region, from 1997–2016. 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. 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, 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 National Academy of Sciences. 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.