[6][7] Grande has won the PROSE award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence from the Association of American Publishers twice, for his books Gems and Gemstones and The Lost World of Fossil Lake.

[8][9] In 2012, he won the Robert H. Gibbs, Jr. Memorial Award from the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists "for an Outstanding Body of Published Work in Systematic Biology.

His master's thesis was on a group of 40 million- to 58 million-year-old fossil localities in western North America collectively known as the Green River Formation.

[21][2] In late 1978, he submitted part of his thesis to be published as a book, attracting the attention of Colin Patterson at the Natural History Museum in London.

As a consequence of that recommendation, Grande received a fellowship for a PhD program through the American Museum and the City University of New York under the guidance of Nelson and Rosen.

Over the years he has been a content specialist for some of the Field Museum's most successful exhibits, including Evolving Planet[22] and The Grainger Hall of Gems.

Grande and Bemis built an integrative project lasting more than 15 years in an attempt to better understand the base of the evolutionary tree for ray-finned fishes.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, they traveled to 12 different countries and 14 different states to study museum collections, resulting in a number of influential publications.

[31] As a result, in 2009 he began publishing books aimed at broader audiences about the importance and appeal of science and natural history museum research.

[32][33] His first book on the topic was entitled Gems and Gemstones: Timeless Natural Beauty of the Mineral World, which was published in 2009 with co-author Allison Augustyn.