Alexander Morgan

Professional History

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and much of my childhood was spent in the open spaces of California, including backpacking throughout the Sierra Nevada mountains. So when I enrolled at UC Santa Cruz and I had to select a major, geology seemed like an obvious choice, and I imagined that I could get paid to continue exploring the outdoors. After mixing up course numbers I enrolled in a planetary science class by accident but was immediately enthralled by the subject matter and switched my undergraduate program to planetary geology. After completing my B.S. degree from UC Santa Cruz I worked as a research associate at NASA Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute examining martian alluvial fans. I continued this work during my Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. During my final two years in grad school I was a predoctoral fellow at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, the scientific research branch of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. I was hired as an associate research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in 2020, and was soon promoted to a research scientist. I maintain a research appointment at the Smithsonian Institution.