Grace Brush

Born: 1931

Country of Birth: Nova Scotia

Nationality: Canadian-American

Ethnicity: White

St. Francis Xavier University BA Economics 1949; University of Illinois MS Botany 1951; Harvard University PhD Paleobotany 1956

""The reality of someone being excluded from all aspects of learning based on sex alone at Princeton, one of the great universities in the country, just did not make any sense and impressed on me the terrible injustice of racial discrimination, which I had certainly read about but did not experience or actually see. I had never lived in a large city." (hub.jhu.edu); (While working at Princeton) "I often had to explain to department chairs why I was asking for salary for myself since I had a husband. I tried to explain that when I was working either in the lab or field I had to pay for child care." (hub.jhu.edu); “My most important contribution to ecology so far [1988] has been the vegetation map of Maryland, which shows the close relationship between lithologies that are similar hydrologically and distributions of the natural forests. The work that my students and I are doing now on reconstructing estuarine history using the stratigraphic record is also providing interesting insights on the influence of man on the environment.” (esa.org); "I think the way we are most effective is by getting really indisputable evidence to the people whose job it is to argue for the right management and policy." (pages.jhu.edu); "

— Grace Brush

Field of Study: Paleoecology

Institution/Corporation: Johns Hopkins University

Degrees & Memberships: None found

Awards: 2001 George E. Owen Teaching Award, Student Council Johns Hopkins University; 2004 Mathias Medal, Maryland Sea Grant; Odum Life Achievement Award, Estuarine Research Foundation

Achievements: known for her work on the pre- and post-Colonial ecology of the Chesapeake Bay & helped scientists and geographers better understand how the clearing of forests surrounding the bay in the 18th century impacted the ecosystem; did a 3-year study to map the vegetation of Maryland and compare the species distributions to geology/soils distributions that was was published in Ecological Monographs; pieced together evidence of the relationships between failing fisheries, river sediment, the sudden disappearance of underwater grasses, and a bay with a serious chemical imbalance; with her colleagues developed an apparatus to determine the fall velocity of ragweed, oak, willow, hickory, and chestnut pollen grains: with Sherri Cooper used diatoms to prove that agriculture increases anoxia (a severe loss of oxygen);