Shulamit Gross

Shulamit Gross (; lived 1 October 1923 – 19 Sep 2012) was an Israeli mineralogist and geologist who studied the Hatrurim Formation.

Biography Gross was born as Shulamit Lifszyc in Grodno, Poland (today, Hrodna, Belarus). She was the daughter of Fryda and Mejer Lifszyc. She studied in the local Tarbut school, and later on at the Belarusian State Polytechnic Institute in Minsk. These rare minerals only form at high temperature, for example in places where siliceous limestones are contact-metamorphosed by volcanic rocks (commonly basalt). Some of these well crystallized anhydrous minerals, preserved by the local desertic conditions of this very arid area, serve as end-member reference for the mineral phases formed in the clinker of man-made Portland cement, and are still studied as natural analogues. The manufacturing of Portland cement involves a similar process: heating of limestone or chalk with siliceous clay at high temperature (1450 °C).

She continued to study these rare minerals and in 1977 published a monograph describing 123 mineral species discovered in the Hatrurim Formation. Five were previously known only from a single locality, and eight others were known only as artificial products of the cement industry. Gross also discovered several minerals completely new to science: bentorite, ye'elimite, and hatrurite. A fourth mineral discovered by Gross was only described later by Dietmar Weber and Adolf Bischoff, which they named grossite after Shulamit.

She demonstrated that the unique mineral assemblages of the Hatrurim Formation were formed by pyrometamorphism, and she managed to recreate in the laboratory most of the minerals by heating the precursor sedimentary rocks of the Ghareb and Taqiye formations.

Her discoveries earned her the inaugural Rafael Freund Award of the Israeli Geological Society in 1979. She became an honorary member of the Israel Geological Society in 1986. Shulamitite, ideally , is a mineral intermediate between perovskite and brownmillerite , a mineral of the cement clinker. She died on September 18, 2012.