M. Grant Gross Jr., former director of the Chesapeake Research Consortium (1994 – 2001) has passed away. “Grant was a steady hand at the helm when it came to ocean science…he was instrumental in advancing ocean science in the U.S. He was cutting edge, and a fixture at the times. He also worked hard at getting minorities into oceanography. He was all about inclusiveness,” said Dr. Michael J. Roman of Easton, a professor and director of the Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge, part of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Though born and raised in Texas, far from the coast, Grant spent his entire professional career in oceanography. He was a 1954 graduate of Princeton University, studying for a year in Holland at the Delft University of Technology on a Fulbright Fellowship. He served in the Army and then went on to obtain a Master’s degree in 1958 and then his Ph.D. in marine geology in 1961 from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

During his lengthy career, he held faculty positions at the University of Washington in Seattle, State University of New York at Stony Brook, was an associate curator of sedimentology at the Smithsonian Institute, lead the oceanographic section of the National Science Foundation, and became director of the Chesapeake Bay Institute at Johns Hopkins University. 

One of Grant’s passions was writing. He wrote a college-level text, “Principles of Oceanography” and co-authored “Oceanography, a View of Earth” with his wife, Dr. Elizabeth R. Bulleid. His expertise in the fields of marine geochemistry, sedimentary processes in coastal waters and waste disposal from urban areas were translated in those and his other books including, “The Ocean World”, “Waste Disposal”, and “Ocean Dumping and Marine Pollution: Geological Aspects of Waste Disposal.”

Grant passed away on December 17th at the age of 84. He is survived by his wife, a son (Jeffrey G. Gross of Texas), two daughters (E. Anne Hamel of Maryland and Alison Gilbert of Oregon), a sister (Marianna Ekelund of California), 10 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren.