Margaret A. Palmer is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Entomology at the University of Maryland and director of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center . With a background in hydrology and ecology, Palmer has contributed to testing and extending fundamental theory in marine and stream ecosystems on the interactions between organisms, boundary layer flows, and geomorphic processes. She is an international expert on the restoration of streams and rivers and co-author of the book Foundations of Restoration Ecology. She has worked extensively on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem processes, the biogeochemistry of streams and wetlands, and organism dispersal in aquatic ecosystems. Palmer is widely published and has been an invited speaker in numerous and diverse settings including regional and international forums, science-diplomacy venues, and popular outlets such as The Colbert Report. Dr. Palmer has received many honors including election as a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, the Lilly Fellows Program, and the Award of Research Excellence from the Society for Freshwater Science.
Education and early career
Palmer was born in 1955 in Florida, grew up in foothills of the South Carolina mountains and attended Emory University as a first generationcollege student. She completed her M.S. and Ph.D. in coastal oceanography at the University of South Carolina with a focus on hydrodynamics and dispersal of benthic organisms. In 1987 Palmer went to the University of Maryland and began research to test in streams hypotheses derived from fundamental ecological theory that was developed in marine systems related to the role of hydrodynamics and boundary layer flows in the community dynamics of invertebrates. Since then she has been actively engaged in research and teaching at the University of Maryland aside from a 1.5 year stint as a program officer in Ecology at the National Science Foundation.
Current activities
By the late 1990s she began working closely with natural resource managers to better understand how basic research could contribute to the conservation and restoration of running-water systems. This ultimately led her to propose creation of a National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center which now serves the broad community of social, natural, and computational scholars, policy makers, business leaders, and other stakeholders in co-developing solutions to difficult problems at the interface of humans and nature. Aside from current work with SESYNC, her active research group focuses on watershed and social approaches to restore streams and on the role of intermittent streams in the flux of materials to perennial waters. She also works extensively with nonprofits on freshwater issues and on the impact of coal mining on running-water systems in the Appalachians and in Alaska.
Major professional work experience
2011-present Director, National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center
Palmer, M.A. et al. 2004. Ecology for a crowded planet. Science 304: 1251-1252.
Bernhardt, E.S., M. A. Palmer et al. 2005. Restoration of U.S. Rivers: a national synthesis. Science 308:636-637.
Palmer, M.A. et al. 2010. Mountaintop Mining Consequences. Science 327 : 148-149.
Palmer, M.A., C. Reidy, C. Nilsson et al. 2008. Climate change and the world’s river basins: anticipating response options. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6: 81-89.
