The Mineral Meteor Man

Some young boys collect baseball cards, others collect coins. But when Lawrence Grossman was growing up in Toronto, Canada, he collected minerals.

"I built a nice mineral collection, rare minerals," said Grossman. "I still have the collection but it stopped growing way back when." Little did Grossman know that his career would be all about minerals, found in meteors, no less.

Now in his thirty-sixth year of teaching University of Chicago students about mineralogy and the formation of the planets, Grossman has just been chosen to receive the 2009 Leonard Medal from the Meteoritical Society. This honor has also been bestowed on two other professors in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the U of C, both of whom Grossman has worked with.

According to the society's chairman of the Leonard Medal Committee, Frank Podosek, the Leonard Medal is a career award, and Grossman has conducted some "pioneering work" starting with his Ph.D. thesis and throughout his career, Podosek said. Grossman will receive the award at the society's meeting in July 2009 in France.

Grossman's interest in studying meteorites stems from his curiosity about how the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. He explains that since meteorites were never a part of planets - which have an ever-changing mineral composition- they reflect the makeup of the original gas cloud from which the solar system formed. While this is a widely accepted theory by scientists about the solar system's birth, Grossman keeps his personal and professional beliefs separate.

"I am a religiously observant Jew, but I don't bring my science into the synagogue, and I don't bring the synagogue into the laboratory. You can get very confused, very fast," Grossman said.

But Grossman did not even know what a meteorite was until he went to Yale University in 1968 to work on his Ph.D. He went to Yale right after marrying his wife Karen, and graduating from McMaster University in Ontario with a Bachelor of Science in geology and chemistry. As a graduate student, he also worked for his eventual thesis adviser, Karl K. Turekian, who also gave him a job as curator of the university's old meteor collection.

"[Turekian] had a research group in which there was an environment of mutual learning and pursuit of interests," Grossman said of one of his primary mentors. "He provided a climate and an atmosphere in which graduate students could come in interested in something completely different than what he was interested in."

While the curator job piqued his interested in meteors, it wasn't until a combination of events occurred in the spring of 1969 that led him to his thesis on the composition of meteorites.

Grossman was taking one of Turekian's classes, and since Turekian was an editor for many academic journals at the time, he often presented papers he was reading to his class. One paper he shared with them was co-authored by U of C professor and winner of the Leonard Medal in 1974, Edward Anders. This paper inspired Grossman's thesis, and he began working out calculations that showed inconsistencies in meteor makeup that differed from Anders' research.

In February of 1969, a rare meteorite hit Northern Mexico and Grossman was able to get a chunk of it to analyze in Turekian's laboratory. The lab was prepared for such analysis because labs across the country were getting ready to study moon rocks from the NASA lunar landings that would occur in July. As it turned out, his calculations on the makeup of certain meteors exactly matched the makeup of this meteor.

"I was giving papers about this meteorite at meetings when everybody else was working on the moon rocks," Grossman said. "A lot of people's attention was diverted to that stuff when I was talking about this."

Even if he did not receive the recognition at the time, Grossman's thesis and his future work with other cosmochemists - chemists who study extraterrestrial matter - created the foundation of knowledge on which the field of study is based.

A stroke of luck landed Grossman on the faculty at U of C right after he graduated - something that would never happen today, Grossman said.

"I was already here on the faculty when [Grossman] joined after finishing his Ph.D. in 1972," said Professor Robert Clayton, Ph.D., the second U of C Leonard Medalist. "Since we work on similar things.it was natural that we would work together and collaborate, and we've been doing that ever since." Clayton, who will have taught at U of C for 50 years this October, also regards Grossman as "good personal friend."

When Grossman's not examining meteorite fragments that showered in south suburban Park Forest (which happened in 2003), or analyzing Comet Wild-2 samples (which NASA's Stardust spacecraft brought back to earth in 2006), he's rooting for the Chicago White Sox. He also enjoys traveling with his wife to their second home near Las Vegas.

"We've had a number of dealings together," said Grossman's neighbor in Las Vegas, Wheels Bauder. "He's quite the comedian, at least he tries. He and his wife are always extremely cordial and extremely reasonable."

Bauder has only known Grossman for a year, but he thinks that he is a "deserving winner" of the Leonard Medal for all of his hard work and efforts.

Despite his accolades and achievements, the accomplishment Grossman is most proud of is his two children, who are now in their early thirties. He said that they are "good fans" and very interested in his work, even if they're not cosmochemists.

I guess they didn't collect minerals when they were young like their dad.