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George A. Cowan was trained as a physical chemist. On graduation from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1941, he joined the Physics Department at Princeton to work under Eugene Wigners direction on research leading to the design of the first uranium chain reactor. He transferred with this group to the University of Chicago's "Metallurgical Laboratory" in 1942 and helped construct the historic pile reactor under Stagg Field.
With the defeat of Germany, Cowan went briefly to Columbia University and then to Los Alamos. He was stationed in the Pacific in 1946 to participate in Operation Crossroads, the first test of the effect of nuclear weapons on naval combat vessels. On his return, he married Helen Siegel Dunham in Santa Fe and became an instructor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh while completing work on his graduate degree. In 1949 he returned to Los Alamos and helped identify products from the first Russian atomic bomb test. He continued at Los Alamos, retiring from full time employment in 1988 after serving in the latter years as Associate Director for Research and Senior Laboratory Fellow. During this period, he was awarded the New Mexico Academy of Science Distinguished Scientist Award, the Robert H. Goddard Award, and the E.O. Lawrence Award. He served on the White House Science Council in the Reagan years. In 1991 he was awarded the Enrico Fermi Prize for his contributions during his career as a nuclear scientist. He is a fellow or member of numerous professional societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, and Sigma Xi.
Cowan served on numerous boards and advisory groups of federal, state, and government agencies. These include the U.S. Air Force Technical Applications Center, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, NAS/NRDC, the Regents of New Mexico Institute of Technology, the Los Alamos Hospital,the Santa Fe Opera, the Santa Fe Opera Foundation, the National Center for Genome Resources, and chair of the Los Alamos Concert Association and the Los Alamos Public Utilities Board. He is a board member of the National Foundation for Functional Brain Imaging and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. In the business community he was a founding director of the Los Alamos National Bank, serving as chair for thirty years during which period it rose to its present position as the largest private bank in New Mexico, and as chair of the board of Trinity Capital Corporation, He continues to serve on these and various other boards.
In 1983 Cowan convened and led the founding group of the Santa Fe Institute, a center for the growing field of research on complex, adaptive systems, becoming president on its incorporation in 1984. He retired from this position in 1991 but continues to serve on the board and is a Distinguished Fellow of the Institute. | 