Newton Ennis Morton (21 December 1929 – 7 February 2018) was an American population geneticist and one of the founders of the field of genetic epidemiology.

[3] After marrying a woman from Hawaii, Morton decided to attend the University of Hawaiʻi to earn a BA in Zoology, finishing his degree in 1951.

He published papers on the linkage of blood groups with diseases,[4] nonrandomness of consanguineous marriage[5] and the inheritance of human birth weight.

After realizing that the department was no longer tenable due to administrative problems, he instead decided to set up the Population Genetics Laboratory at Hawaii in 1964.

He left Hawaii in 1985 and spent two years at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City as the head of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Morton retired from the University of Southampton in April 2011 due to age and Alzheimer's-related health problems.