Only About 100 Minerals Are Named for Women: Priscilla Grew '62 Joins the List
A newly discovered mineral has been named priscillagrewite-(Y) , in honor of Priscilla Grew '62, geology professor emerita at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The new mineral, priscillagrewite-(Y), is a member of the Garnet Group, rich in zirconium and yttrium, and was discovered in pyrometamorphic rocks (rocks heated by natural combustion of hydrocarbons) in the Transjordan plateau, close to Amman, Jordan. These rocks are the source of green stone beads known from Neolithic archeological sites in the Near East. The naming honors Grew's contributions to metamorphic petrology and geoarcheology.
The International Mineralogical Association currently recognizes 5,700 mineral species. Only about 100 of them have been named after women.
"As far as I know, I am the first Bryn Mawr graduate to have a new mineral named after me," says Grew.
Researchers Irina Galuskina and Evgeny Galuskin of the University of Silesia discovered the garnet, and decided to honor Grew in part because in 1966 she obtained the first images of oscillatory zoning of manganese in a garnet. As this Nebraska Today article puts it, Grew's discovery "was a major geological achievement in a career that would come to be defined by them."
Grew is a Senior Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America, and in 1999 was awarded the American Geosciences Institute Medal in Memory of Ian Campbell for Superlative Service to the Geosciences.
She continues to serve as UNL coordinator for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, under which Native American human remains from past university archaeological collections are returned to tribes through a complex federal process. She is a member of the finance committee of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics for the term 2019-2023 and is a faculty fellow of the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute.
"I am greatly honored to have a new garnet from Jordan named after me by a team from Poland and Israel. It makes me realize once again the tremendous debt I owe to the geology program at Bryn Mawr, how it directly led to my garnet research at Berkeley, and to my involvement in international geoscience.
"I am an 'academic granddaughter' of Florence Bascom because her student Dorothy Wyckoff recruited me to metamorphic petrology and saw me off to Berkeley to follow the success of Reba Benedict Fournier '52 and Maria Luisa Buse Crawford '60.
"The letters of recommendation for my NSF Graduate Fellowships at Berkeley came from two eminent scientists who taught me as a Bryn Mawr undergraduate. Visiting Lecturer Alfred G. Fischer (Princeton) taught me paleontology in fall 1960 and recommended that I take Summer School 'Recent Sedimentation' at the University of Colorado in 1961 from Tjeerd H. van Andel (Scripps). Both of them launched my international geoscience network and remained supportive friends and career mentors ever after." —Priscilla Grew '62.