Since retiring from UNL in 2015, I am Professor Emerita in EAS and Director Emerita in the University of Nebraska State Museum. I continue to serve as UNL Coordinator for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), under which Native American human remains from past university archaeological collections are returned to tribes through a complex federal process. I am a member of the Finance Committee of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) for the term 2019-2023 and I am a Faculty Fellow of the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute.
My early research was in metamorphic petrology of blueschists and eclogites in California. I then helped to manage a major interdisciplinary research project based at UCLA on the environmental and societal impacts of coal and water development in the Colorado River Basin. It was an unprecedented National Science Foundation project including anthropology, economics, epidemiology, law, and political science as well as the natural sciences.
For 11 years, I was a state government official in California applying geosciences to public policy, working with earthquake and landslide hazard mitigation and geothermal energy. I was Director of the California Department of Conservation (which includes the state geological survey and the state regulatory agency for oil and gas), and I was a Commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission. Later I was Director of the Minnesota Geological Survey, which conducts major research and public outreach on Precambrian and glacial geology, groundwater and mineral resources.
From 1993 to 1999, I was Vice Chancellor for Research at UNL, and then returned to teaching undergraduate Physical Geology, Environmental Geology, and Geology of National Parks. From 2003 to 2015, I was Director of the University of Nebraska State Museum of Natural History, which includes research collections in paleontology, petrology, and mineralogy, as well as anthropology, botany, entomology, parasitology, and zoology.
Selected Publications
Gosselin, D.C. and P.C. Grew, 2002, EarthScope
education and outreach in Nebraska,
Creating the EarthScope Legacy Workshop,
August 4-7, 2002, U. Arizona, Tucson.
Grew, P.C. and Hansen, C., 2002, The Interstate
Oil and Gas Compact Commission: a
partnership involving geoscientists and
policy makers, Geological Society of America
2002 Annual Meeting, Abstracts with
Programs, 34, 73.
Grew, P.C., 1994, Geological Factors in the
sustainable development of large cities, in
Proceedings of the International Symposium
on Geo-environments: The road from Rio: an
agenda for res, Tokyo, pp. 25-26.
Grew, P.C., 1981, Seismic hazards: a state
government perspective, Social and
economic effects of earthquakes on utility
lifelines (edited by Isenberg, J. (ed.)), Amer.
Soc. Civil Engineers, San Francisco, pp.18-27.
Anderson, O.L. and Grew, P.C., 1977, Stress corrosion
theory of crack propagation with applications to
geophysics, Reviews of Geophysics and Space
Physics, 15, 77-104.