Norma Gross was an American chemist. She was married to an Army lieutenant who was stationed at Los Alamos during the Second World War. Gross, who had a master’s in chemistry from Bryn Mawr, joined the Women’s Army Corps and was assigned to Los Alamos in 1944. Gross was part of a group that produced radioactive lanthanum-140 for the atomic bombs’ initiators. She was often mistakenly written up as “Norman Gross” by writers who assumed she was a man.
After the war, Gross taught chemistry at Queens College in New York until her retirement in 1993. She died on January 22, 2009 in New York.