Adelheid Fischer

Alum 2006

Adelheid Fischer is co-director of InnovationSpace, a sustainable product-development program at Arizona State University. She leads the program’s biomimicry initiative, which introduces students to the use of biology as a means of sustainable innovation in design, business, and engineering. She also serves as assistant director of ASU’s Biomimicry Center.

Fischer also is a writer who focuses on natural history, ecology, and environmental history. She has written for many publications, including Utne Reader, Orion, Conservation, Places, and Arizona Highways.

She is the co-author of Valley of Grass: Tallgrass Prairie and Parkland of the Red River Region, winner of a Minnesota Book Award for Nature Writing. With Minnesota ecologist Chel Anderson, she has coauthored North Shore: A Natural History of Minnesota’s Superior Coast. In 2014 she received the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award. She currently is working on a new book that explores the ecology of grief and loss in the sky islands of southeastern Arizona.

Fischer makes her home at the foot of South Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona, where she shares her yard, and sometimes her house, with nighthawks, southern house spiders, scorpions, coyotes, cactus wrens, and the occasional javelina.