After 42 years of service to the University of Colorado Boulder, including stints as professor, department chair, researcher and recently as vice provost and associate vice chancellor for undergraduate education, Michael Grant will retire from the university this spring. A retirement reception will be held on April 29, 3 to 6 p.m. in the C4C Flatirons room.
One constant through all his years with CU-Boulder has been his love of teaching and the classroom. A first-generation college graduate - no one in his family on either side had even started college at the time he completed his degrees - Grant recognized early the significance of teachers in students' lives. And it's something he's been passionate about his whole career.
"I had a high school chemistry teacher who I really enjoyed working with," Grant said.
It was the experience with that teacher that initially led him to study and earn a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Texas Tech University. However, his love of the outdoors led him in another direction.
"I recognized that to be a chemical scientist I would spend most of my time in the laboratory," he said. "I wanted to do laboratory work, but I also wanted to do field work outdoors. So I moved to biology."
As a professor and administrator, Grant has taught every semester since he stepped foot on campus, something that is not always possible for administrators.
"Many administrators try to keep their research going to some extent, and I've chosen to do that in the classroom rather than the laboratory or field," he said.
Having worked with thousands of students over the years, Grant said the decision to stay in the classroom was an easy one.
"I enjoy working with the students," Grant said. "I get to watch them say 'Oh, I see that now.'"
The connections he has built with students over the years have lasted for years, even decades. "I still get occassional emails from students I had 20 or 30 years ago. One of my former students wrote to me and said, 'Dr. Grant - I had this statistical problem in my job and I wanted to know if the warranty on my biometry class was still good. I assured her it was."
Throughout his career, Grant has received numerous teaching awards and recognitions, nationally and at CU, including being elected as a President's Teaching Scholar, a CU system-wide honor; and receiving the Hazel Barnes Award for Teaching and Research Excellence. He also was a nominee for U.S. Professor of the Year, an honor given by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
As vice provost and associate vice chancellor for undergraduate education, Grant has led the expansion and enhancement of several campus undergraduate programs. Under his watch and leadership, the Norlin Scholars program was founded in 1999.
"One of the things I'm most proud of is that we've strengthened the undergraduate experience here on a broad scale," Grant said. "We've really worked to strengthen our Student Academic Success Center, Office of International Education, Presidents Leadership Class and Norlin Scholars Program, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and our ROTC programs."
In a research capacity, Grant, who is a professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, has served as the resident expert for fall aspen tree colors. One of his most widely publicized research findings also involves the quaking aspen. In the early 1990s, Grant and fellow CU-Boulder professors Jeffry Mitton and Yan Linhart published a paper in Nature magazine asserting that a particular aspen clone in Utah - that the team later dubbed Pando, for the Latin word "I spread" - deserved consideration for being the world's largest living organism. Pando consists of nearly 50,000 tree trunks covering roughly 106 acres. Grant and his colleagues calculated that the aspen clone weighed in at about 13 million pounds, which would make it the most massive organism in the world known to date.
With his retirement on the horizon, Grant is not sure what is next.
"I really enjoyed competitive amateur golf," he said. "I have won something like 25 amateur tournaments and qualified for the national senior amateur tournament. The other hobby that I have really taken up is tropical coral reef scuba diving. I've been fortunate enough to dive in some really beautiful places around the world."
But wrapping up a CU-Boulder career that spans more than four decades won't be easy.
"I expect this to be a very hard adjustment for me," Grant said. "The university, especially over the last 20 years, has been almost my whole life. So it's going to be very, very hard for me to make the adjustment."
