Since retiring from UNL in 2015, I am Professor Emerita in EAS, Director Emerita in the University of Nebraska State Museum, and Faculty Fellow in the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute. I am currently UNL Advisor 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. While I was Chair of the UNL Human Remains and Funerary Compliance Committee 1994-1999 and NAGPRA Coordinator for UNL 1998-2022, UNL repatriated the remains of 1,937 ancestors to Tribes. Since 2021 I have been a Member of the UNL Chancellor’s Native American and Indigenous Advisory Board. For my contributions to UNL, I received the 2020 Wisherd Award for Outstanding Service to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL Emeriti and Retirees Association).
I enjoy my continuing work in science diplomacy. In July 2023 I was re-elected to a second term 2023-2027 as a member of the Finance Committee of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG). I am an Ex-Officio Member of the U.S. National Committee for IUGG which I chaired 2003-2011. I am also a Member of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) Expert Group on Geological Heritage and Geoconservation (EG-GEOCON).
In 2022 I was awarded the President’s Medal of the Geological Society of America. A new mineral discovered in Jordan was named after me in 2020: priscillagrewite-Y is a member of the Garnet Supergroup with the formula (Ca2Y)Zr2(AlO4)3 . In 1999 I received the American Geosciences Institute Ian Campbell Medal for Superlative Service to the Geosciences.
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
Grew, P., 2023, Invited: Managing future water supplies in the Colorado River Basin in the southwestern United States requires an interdisciplinary systems approach, XXVIII General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) (Berlin 2023). https://doi.org/10.57757/IUGG23-3771 https://gfzpublic.d-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_5020774
Grew, P. , 2022, Invited: GSA President's Medal Lecture: Water and Coal Development Impacts On The Navajo Nation Assessed By The Interdisciplinary Lake Powell Research Project 1971-1977. Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, Denver. Vol 54, No. 5 doi: 10.1130/abs/2022AM-377682 https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2022AM/webprogram/Paper377682.html
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.