In the fall of 2025, we received a note with a donation that caught our eye.
Michael Grimm ’89 wrote, "I graduated from the Environmental Studies Program in 1989 and loved it. I’ve now just retired from USGS as Associate Director for Natural Hazards and was with FEMA for over two decades most recently as Deputy Associate Administrator for Resilience. The ENVS Program made a huge impact on me and my career.
This was, of course, far from the first time we had heard from students and alumni who were huge fans of UVM’s Environmental Program, and that it formed and directed careers. But knowing that ENVS was the start of a career path for someone who has had such an impact in the world, and then circled that impact back to UVM, was a story we wanted to learn more about.
Mike met with us in December 2025 to share a bit of his story.
While at UVM
Even as a kid, Mike says, he “just always wanted to do science.” He once thought that might mean marine biology, but by the time he was getting ready to enter college, he was focused on hydrology, specifically fluvial geomorphology, the study of how water shapes the land.
By 1985, when Mike arrived on campus, UVM’s Environmental Program (EP) had matured into a vibrant, cross-disciplinary space for students, faculty and staff who cared deeply about ecology and our planet’s future.
It was an exciting and welcoming place for a young scholar with a passion for interacting with and understanding the world around him. And a great place to develop as a scientist and a citizen. The major attracted people with many different areas of interest and focus, and within that diversity of thought grew a caring, interconnected and active community.
Besides his coursework, he valued the close-knit relationships that he found, and, looking back, marvels at how faculty simultaneously supported both a fun, relaxed atmosphere and “good, rigorous learning.” He befriended fellow first-year students Neil Kamman '89 and Tom Hollenbeck '89 nearly immediately, meeting the former at freshman orientation and Tom as a dormmate in Marsh.
Standout faculty members included the program’s founder Carl Reidel and Jean (Flack) Richardson, Ian Worley and Rick Paradis. Mike has especially fond memories with Rick following a summer internship in the Natural Areas program, that, he says, was as full of fun as it was of learning, which suited his love of hands-on learning especially perfectly. He remembers that, “Any excuse to go out in the woods and do science was great. That internship was an excuse to get in a canoe and get out on some lakes and do some water sampling, and hike around some of UVM’s Natural Areas to check out the trails. It was just a wonderful summer experience.”
"Getting to spend two summers wandering around UVM’s natural areas, learning data collection and some of the science pieces was amazing, and it taught me a lot of skills in addition to new ways to appreciate land and waters. For instance, we got to delve into the geology of Pease Mountain, which during glacial times was an island, so we’d go looking for sand on top of the mountain – which once had been beaches.”
These are treasured memories, but even more, they were the experiences that taught him field work, which in turn became the basis of his eventual Nuquist award-winning senior thesis: The Geo-Ecological Significance of Pease Mountain.
And from there this learning would have a huge impact on a career that would take him across many types of metaphorical and actual terrain.
How a Transdisciplinary Approach Mattered in Learning and in a Career
Multiple disciplines were always at the core of the EP. Practice with the tools of conducting field research, the mathematics that allowed for interpretation, understanding more about how the different parts of an ecosystem, a landscape, come together and function, and how human interactions were a part of the story, were all part of the curriculum.
It was a varied combination that attracted different sorts of thinkers, and within that diversity came a richness of social ties and ways of sharing learning.
“I remember one class, I think it was Ian Worley's. We had to do a project and so for the project, I wrote a a handful of songs and Neil and Tom and I recorded them on a four-track and I turned that in for my assignment.” He laughed, “You know, it was environmental songs that probably weren’t very good, but it was fun! And it was fun to have the ability to go do geology and have fun doing science, but I also could do something like that.”
He laughs about it now, but having different ways of understanding, interpreting, and relaying complex science would matter a great deal in his work.
With leadership roles at FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) and USGS (the United States Geological Survey), much of his work centered around disaster reduction, or as he refers to it, “the intersection of natural hazards and people, buildings and infrastructure, and more.”
There’s a cool factor to the science of “earthquakes and plates moving and volcanoes and landslides and all this stuff going on out in the woods,” he readily admits. But alongside that coolness lies the necessity of taking action, and of providing a basis for decision-making for people and for communities.
“We can have the science to explain what’s happening, but then how do you apply it? How do you talk about natural disasters, bringing the science and the connection with land-use decisions, and even individual decisions that people make on whether or not to live in a floodplain, and if you live in a flood plain, do you get flood insurance, for example? Or do you do some mitigation and elevate your house if you're going to choose to do it? Or if you're living in a fault zone, you know, what can you do?”
“There are so many of those societal issues and policy issues woven through it …and that's where the environmental program with its interdisciplinary approach helps by broadening your thinking so much beyond just, ‘oh, what triggered this landslide?’ or, ‘why is the magma coming out this way?’
True to his EP roots, he admits that he’s interested in both – the causes of particular events, and the ways that people respond to them.
It’s a sensibility he used when he was in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and also in Vermont assisting with clean-up after Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, and one he believes in today. It’s an approach that has let him be of meaningful service throughout his career, no matter who’s been at the helm of the government. “Risk and disasters don't follow political boundaries. Everybody is susceptible to some kind of hazard, whether it's a flood or an earthquake or a tornado or winter weather, cold weather or heat.”
Thinking about Today's UVM and Today's Students
From the vantage point of an alumnus, and as the parent of a recent student, he appreciates UVM’s growth and changes, alongside what remains steady.
“Campus is just amazing now. There’s so much that’s new, but when I was there to celebrate my daughter (Keeley Grimm DNP ’23) it all still felt like UVM, which was great to see,” he offered.
“To today’s students, I would say take advantage of it all - just take lots of different stuff to take advantage of that interdisciplinary nature of the program.”
And that's not just a free-floating piece of advice, but something he is helping make real. He has now joined the ranks of alumni supporters of UVM.
What it was like to become a donor to the program that meant so much to him? He laughed at the question and told us, “My wife is really good at keeping us on track for giving gifts. And I saw other organizations that we had donated to and I said, ‘Hey, I should give to UVM and in particular the Environmental Studies program!’ And so I credit my wife with that. Not that I didn't ever want to, but her giving was the prompt! It is wonderful to be in a position that we are able to provide that support.”
We wondered what he’d be especially excited to support, and Mike’s answer was as thoughtful and pragmatic as the whole conversation had been. “The program has changed so much since I was there that I don’t know exactly where I’d hope a gift would go. I mean, the internship program made a big impact on me. So if it's going to things like that, that's wonderful,” he offered.
With passionate students, faculty and staff, and enthusiastic alumni and donors, that impact will go on and on.
Learn More
UVM Alumni are living rich lives, engaged in inspirational and impactful work in many fields, in communities around Vermont, across the US, and around the world. Here are just a few of the stories we've gotten to share recently:
Highlights from the 2025 George V. Kidder Lecture with Allan Strong '83
Cami Davis '76 on Art, Ecology and UVM Campus Life in the 70s
UVM's Environmental Program
Class Notes, as shared by hundreds of alumni for inclusion in the Fall 2025 University of Vermont Magazine
Michael Grimm '89 on Becoming a Supporter of UVM's Environmental Program
Cheryl Carmi
Mar 2, 2026