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Fred Stross, a long-time Visiting Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Stross retired from a research career with the Shell Development Company in 1970, only to take up a second career in his retirement. He was a guest of Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

An analytical chemist with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Chemistry, Stross became interested in applying chemical methods to the study of archaeological artifacts. After retirement, he became a Research Associate with the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Anthropology and a consultant for U. C. Berkeley's R. H. Lowie Museum and the Berkeley University Art Museum. He began working with Professor Robert Fleming Heizer in the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Anthropology. Heizer was a distinguished archaeologist who studied Native American peoples of the western United States.

Shortly after, he also began working with Frank Asaro in the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's Nuclear Chemistry Division, who was applying chemical analysis methods including neutron activation analysis to the problem of determining where archaeological artifacts were made, as well as sometimes checking on their authenticity.

For more than three decades, Stross worked with Asaro and others on artifacts from various cultures and ages. His most famous work may be his participation in the study of the origin of two Egyptian quartzite statues, the Colossi of Memnon, in a paper that was a cover article in Science magazine. Stross also worked extensively on determining the origin of obsidian artifacts found in New World sites.

Stross published translations of French, Italian and German technical texts, and was very active in the application of the physical sciences to archaeology. He was a past president of the S. F. Archaeological Institute of America, a former chairman of the Subcommittee on Gas Chromatography of the National Research Council, the American Representative for the Gas Chromatography Group of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry, chairman in 1964 of the California Section of the American Chemical Society and the author or co-author of over 100 publications. He also wrote for the California section of the American Chemical Society's periodical, The Vortex.