The Fall Dialogue Series is a monthly conversation about thriving in the Anthropocene, featuring innovative thought leaders from ASU and beyond.

Nancy B. Grimm is a Professor of Ecology in the School of Life Sciences and a Senior Sustainability Scientist at Arizona State University. She studies the interaction of climate variation and change, human activities, and ecosystems. Her research is carried out in both riverine and urban ecosystems, collaborating with hydrologists, engineers, geologists, chemists, sociologists, geographers, and anthropologists.

Her research over more than three decades has focused on how disturbances (such as flooding or drying) affect the structure and processes of desert steam-riparian ecosystems. In her long-term study of Sycamore Creek, Arizona, Grimm and her students and colleagues are currently studying how hydrologic regimes influence ecosystem structure and function and transitions between gravel-bed and wetland ecosystems states.

Since 1997, Grimm has directed the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program, an interdisciplinary study of the Phoenix urban social-ecological ecosystem. In that capacity, she is particularly interested in problems of urban sustainability and resilience to the impacts of climate change on water, infrastructure, and ecosystem processes and services.

Current work with collaborators and students investigates how stormwater infrastructure and land uses affect water and material movement across the urban landscape. Grimm has been President of the Ecological Society of America and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Ecological Society of America.

Grimm chaired or served on numerous national and international advisory and editorial boards, is a past program director for the National Science Foundation and senior scientist for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is author or co-author of over 160 scientific publications, and was a lead author for two chapters of the recently released U.S. National Climate Assessment.

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