Education
Cowie earned First Class Honours from Edinburgh University (bachelor"s degree 1970), and graduated from Harvard University with a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical physics in 1976.
Cowie earned First Class Honours from Edinburgh University (bachelor"s degree 1970), and graduated from Harvard University with a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical physics in 1976.
As a post-doc he was at Princeton University, where he became an associate professor in 1979. In 1980 he was a Fairchild Scholar at Caltech. Beginning in 1980 he was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from 1983 at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
In 1984 Cowie became a professor at Johns Hopkins University and then in 1986 a professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, where from 1986 to 1997 he was also associate director
Cowie"s research deals with the dynamics of interstellar and intergalactic gas. At the University of Hawaii he investigated, with the telescope on Mauna Kea and with the Hubble Space Telescope, the oldest stars and galaxies in the universe and their formation and early development.
Royal Society.