He was also the driving influence in founding the Santa Fe Institute together with Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann and others in 1984, based upon his recognition of the need for a place where scientists could be offered a broader curriculum for "a kind of twenty-first century Renaissance man" and associated research.

Starting as a junior member, Cowan became a jack-of-all-trades, capable of machining graphite blocks used to control the pile's reaction rate and in casting uranium metal.

Following the end of the war and obtaining his PhD in physical chemistry from Carnegie Tech, Cowan returned to work for Los Alamos in 1950.

Only weeks after his arrival, he directed the detection of radioactive fallout from samples collected near the Russian border indicating the Soviets were in possession of a nuclear bomb.

One of his early functions on the panel was to convince U.S. government officials that the radiochemistry of the Russian samples proved that it was not the result of a peaceful nuclear reactor problem, but a Soviet bomb, which was dubbed "Joe-1" after Joseph Stalin.

He believed that our educational culture was enforcing intellectual fragmentation through conservative university programs that depended on specialized grants and funded work.

He knew that beginning in the 1980s numerical experiments through computer simulations were capable of providing the tools to think about very complex problems in a more holistic fashion.

He began to imagine a new and independent type of institute that would combine the charter of a university while sharing some of Los Alamos' personnel and computer power.

Although most of his duties as president did not allow time for research, as Distinguished Fellow of the Institute, Cowan applied neuroscience principles to investigate relationships between children's brain physiological changes and behavioral development.