W. Lowell Morgan received bachelors degrees in physics and in engineering from the University of Michigan in 1969 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada in 1976. He held a post-doctoral position at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) in Boulder and then, from 1979 to 1987, was a staff physicist in the laser and nuclear weapons programs at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Morgan founded Kinema Research & Software in Monument, Colorado in 1989. He has held a number of visiting appointments over the years, including:
- visiting scientist in chemistry at AT&T Bell Laboratories
- visiting fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) in Boulder and acting director of the Atomic Collisions Data Center
- visiting scientist in the physics research unit at the Australian National University
- NATO visiting professor in theoretical chemistry at the University of Bari, Italy
- CNRS fellow at the Center for Atomic Physics, the Universite’ Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
- NATO senior fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland
- NSF fellow in the Institute for Theoretical Atomic & Molecular Physics (ITAMP) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge.
He has taught graduate level statistical physics at the University of California at Davis and at the University of Denver. Current areas of research are in molecular collision physics, plasma and surface chemistry, statistical theory of electron transport in plasmas, and the statistical analysis of inverse problems in molecular collision measurements. He has published more than fifty scientific papers in these fields of research.
Dr. Morgan’s interest in statistics and the statistical
analysis of measurements and data arose in 1969 in his first professional job
wherein he performed experiments using lasers as optical radar for tracking
ballistic missile reentry vehicles and analyzed the signal-to-noise and
coherence characteristics of the reflected light. Much of his professional work since that time has involved
statistical analysis of experiments and data in a variety of areas of applied
physics. The analyses presented in this
document are a natural extension of the kinds of statistical analyses that are
routine in applied physics.