ASU Research E-Magazine: Balancing Spheres Of Influence

Nancy Grimm doesn’t believe in astrology. But she never thought she would become a scientist either. Her sign is Libra, the scales. The only inorganic sign of 12 Zodiac symbols, Libra offsets and integrates the other animal signs. It represents harmony. Balance.

Unity and harmony are as much a part of Nancy Grimm’s inner self as they are of her job. In fact, they are practically written into her job description. Balance not only represents her cosmopolitan outlook, but also defines the area she has chosen to study.

“The thing I like best about ecology is the fact that it integrates so many different fields,” says Grimm, an assistant research scientist at Arizona State University. Her specialty is the study of desert stream ecosytems.

“If you want to do a really good job, then you’ve got to know something about chemistry, and you’ve got to know something about geology and geomorphology, and you’ve got to know something about hydrology and about physical factors. Ecology is relevant to virtually everything.”

The piece of everything that interests Grimm most is the desert stream—an anomaly itself. In contrast to aquatic systems found in forest or mountain regions, desert streams are regularly disrupted. Seasonal floods often sweep away much of the stream plants and animals. They are forced to regenerate and survive as the flood falls to a trickle and is eventually sucked into the cracks of a scorching summer drought.

Until about 15 years ago, no one knew very much about desert streams, even though they occur over one third of the Earth’s land surface. In 1979, Stuart Fisher, now Grimm’s husband, moved to Arizona from Massachusetts to study the ecology of arid land streams. He and Grimm now work as a team. Together, they are discovering some of the important differences that separate arid land streams from those in other climes. What they have found, Grimm says, is challenging the traditional dogma of stream ecology.

Because of annual peaks and troughs in rainfall, desert streams are limited by the one thing that remains constant in most other aquatic environments, and in fact defines them—water. The type of flood or drought disturbance, its length, and its characteristics influence the number and kind of organisms living in a desert stream at any one time.

The desert stream system is highly variable compared to the relatively stable environment in a forest brook or a prairie creek. As a result, Grimm says most of the nutrients in arid land streams are generated within the systems themselves. Based on most ecological models, other streams usually rely on the import of nutrients from outside their boundaries.

Even with these differences, Grimm says arid land streams give insight into the overall picture of aquatic ecology. She says that arid streams are important not only because of their widespread distribution, but also because they are central to the survival of their surrounding ecosystems.

These streams can provide insight into processes found in other streams. Succession, the process of change after disaster, takes hundreds of years in most aquatic ecosystems. Because of the heat and high concentration of light in arid ecosystems, stream recovery can be studied over a period of weeks or months.

Grimm and Fisher have encouraged ecologists worldwide to accommodate the unique characteristics of desert streams into their general ideas about how streams work.

“We’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince people that these streams are not just odd systems that happen to be squirreled away in one corner of the United States and therefore are not important,” Grimm says. But even in ecology, some people fail to see the big picture.

“Some ecologists are chauvinistic about a particular area in which they work,” she says. But not knowing about the questions and research activities in other fields can hurt a scientist, especially when that scientist’s area is so inseparable from everything else.

Grimm herself is very active in cooperative projects. In fact, collaboration is part of her job as an academic professional in the ASU Department of Zoology. Although not equivalent to faculty positions, academic professional appointments are considered parallel. Unlike a professor, Grimm has no teaching responsibilities. Instead, she spends half her time on research and half her time servicing the university’s zoology and ecology communities.

In Grimm’s case, service means everything from pulling together the people and resources for cooperative research to acting as a departmental consultant and representative. It’s a task she feels is important to the success of the department, which strongly emphasizes both research and teaching for professors. Such a focus usually leaves faculty with little time to initiate collaborations. Although staff may be excited about a project, Grimm says they often need to be convinced it is worth their time—and sometimes that’s “like pulling teeth.”

“I try to organize people’s interests and get people excited—and kind of be the person that pushes it through,” she says.

According to Jim Collins, zoology department chairman, Grimm has played “a real leadership role” in bringing researchers and funding together for collaborative endeavors. Since 1991, she has helped bring over $600,000 to the university as director of three major projects.

Grimm has been instrumental in setting up an interdisciplinary environmental lab in the Goldwater Center as well as garnering support for a piece of equipment to be used by the ecology and physiology departments. The $150,000 mass spectrophotometer is used to analyze elements and study nutrient flow and animal metabolism. Grimm also serves as a mentor for undergraduate students doing summer research. She heads the committee that established an ecology concentration for graduate students.

Since 1991 she has served on review panels for the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, both of which take up nearly a month in reading and evaluating other scientists’ proposals. She is current chair of committees in both the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, and the North American Benthological Society.

Grimm’s commitment to simultaneous activities at both the national and local level reflects a “gifted” ability to juggle various important tasks, says Collins. Her continued national involvement “speaks to a real sense of dedication to her career” and reflects the respect she has earned within her community of researchers.

But sometimes such dedication weighs against the things that are most important to her—doing research, helping out graduate students, and doing what she calls “bein’ out.”

“I love bein’ out there (in the desert) and just workin’ and playin’ in the dirt,” she says. “The more you get involved in administrative details and writing grants, the less you actually get to be out there in the field, which is a drag.”

Although she says most of her work is basic research, directed at just finding out how things work, she hopes it will prove useful for people trying to understand other systems or similar systems in different places.

“I think each scientist has to ask himself, ‘What am I doing this for? What’s the relevance?’ Some people are content to say, ‘I’m doing this because I really like it and it’s a good way to live—I get to go out in the stream and mess around with sand, and that’s fun.’

“It would be sad if doing things weren’t fun,” she says. “Some people are content to stop there. For me, it’s a little more important for there to be some impact or relevance to whatever I do. So I have to think hard about what that is.”

Grimm traces this need for connection to her upbringing.

The fifth of six children born to a “liberal and socially active” Midwestern minister and his wife, Grimm said she was always taught to “do something constructive.”

“Every one of us played piano through all the years we were home. Every one of us went to church every Sunday—sometimes twice.”

The Grimm children performed for people at shelters, raised money for low-income families and food banks, and participated in volunteer literacy programs for kids.

Nancy was involved in theater and singing groups, piano, and gymnastics throughout high school. In college she was on one of the country’s first “ultimate frisbee” teams.

In 1973, she chose to go to Hampshire College, near Amherst, Mass. One of the first nontraditional colleges in the United States, Hampshire had a program in which students created their own curriculum. There were no exams and no grades. Students simply had to demonstrate they could conduct research in each of four subject areas. The topics were the students’ choice.

Grimm began wanting to teach English as a foreign language. But after an internship at a local bilingual school, she found it really was not for her. What really turned her on was a first-year ecology class, which she followed with an aquatic ecology class given by Stuart Fisher, who was at Amherst College at the time. In her last year, Grimm completed a research project on stream ecology at Oregon State, and applied to graduate college at Arizona State University, where Fisher had since moved.

“I did not come out here to end up married to him,” she says, laughing and raising her index finger in emphasis. When asked about how she and Fisher’s relationship developed, she is vague:

“It’s sort of a story that we don’t tell, but it happened fairly quickly that we became romantically involved.”

As a result, Grimm had to change interim advisors. She completed both her masters and doctoral degrees at ASU under Wendell Minckley, a fish ecologist. She and Fisher were married in December 1981. They now have two boys, Ian, 8, and Orion, 6.

For all its personal rewards, their union has been hard on Grimm’s career. Because she and Fisher work in the same field, it has been impossible for them both to find faculty positions at nearby institutions.

“She would probably be farther along in her career if she didn’t have to stay here,” Fisher says. Grimm admits that she would have liked to compete for faculty positions once she got out of graduate school.

But she says she likes most aspects of her job anyway.

“I think I have a great job,” she says. “I don’t want too many people to know about it, because they might try to take it away from me.

“I like to interact with the students, but I’d much rather do it the way I’m doing it than stand in front of a class and give lectures. I like things that require people to work together.”

For the last four years, Grimm has coordinated a summer research program for junior and senior ecology students. Beginning in 1995, she also is director of the Ecology Research Experience for Undergraduates (ECOREU) program, a four-year initiative sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The program will recruit eight first- and second-year students into labs of six ecologists. The students receive hands-on experience in four ecology disciplines over the course of two years. Most of the participants will be minority students.

The point of the exercise, says Grimm, is to give students a chance to get turned on by the discovery-mode of science.

“I hope they will get really jazzed about ecology and want to keep going—want to go to graduate school and become an ecologist,” she says.

She’s not worried at all about students becoming excited about science once they get their hands on it, she says. But she is worried about the time the program will take to organize.

“Time is something I don’t have a lot of right now,” she says.

Despite the fact that Fisher says he is “amazed at the number of things she can do at once,” Grimm says she could always be better organized. One of her goals this year is to get back into something she used to really enjoy—martial arts.

It’s one of the few things she does that enables her to put everything out of her mind for a long period of time, she says. And for someone with her schedule, that ability is very important.

“You have to get your mind and body integrated to the point where you can stop your brain enough so your body knows what it’s doing,” she says. Forcing that kind of concentration is one way she has found to balance her three spheres of growth: personal, family, and career.

“It’s still a goal of mine to be balanced,” she says. “I think you can do that—balance your life—if you just work hard at it.”—Alana Mikkelsen