Personal FAQ

My research webpage describes what I study, but like any research website it is also impersonal. So who am I as a person? This is hard to answer in a webpage but a few common questions:

Personal FAQ

• With a name like Morales, what is your background?  I’m a very American mixture, and I usually describe myself as multi-racial hispanic and white. My grandparents are Spanish-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American, and English-American. My grandfathers’ families were immigrants, my maternal grandmother can trace her family to early colonial times, and my paternal grandmother’s family history in the Americas goes much farther back. 

• So what does that make you?   ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  My hispanic heritage is an important part of my self identity, and I've been passionate about STEM access and inclusion for forever. As with anyone, my history and experiences have had a huge impact on my life, but don’t define me either. I do my best to be Miguel.

• Where did you grow up? That’s a complicated question. I was born and spent my first eight months in Revelstoke Canada, then lived in Kansas, Spain, San Francisco, Sacramento. Then I started kindergarten. We lived in Sacramento California for a while, then moved to rural southern Oregon for high school. Then Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Santa Cruz, Boston and lastly Seattle. My Dad’s family is from San Antonio Texas, and my Mom’s family is based near Kelseyville in Northern California. 

• Tell me about your family? I am married to my college sweetheart Ginger Fitzhugh. We don’t have kids, but have a small menagerie of animals that keep us on our toes including our Border Collie Lucy and cats Em and Amiko. Ginger does non-profit program evaluation, focusing on getting girls and under represented minorities interested in STEM.

• What do you like to do? We love to hike, spending as many summer weekends in the mountains as we can with winter walks being in the lowlands or exploring Seattle’s many stairway loops. We also like to travel and explore Seattle’s coffee shops, restaurants, and parks. 

• What is your scholastic history? I was educated in the American public school system in seven different schools. Some of them were great such as the gifted education program in Sacramento (3rd-7th grades), while others were challenging such as the small rural high school in Oregon (neither calculus nor pre-calculus were offered). I then attended Swarthmore College due to the generosity of dead Quakers (ask me about need-blind admissions). After college Ginger and I lived in Milwaukee Wisconsin for three years where I taught science at a private high school before going to graduate school in physics at the University of California Santa Cruz. My PhD was looking for TeV gamma ray bursts with the Milagro Cherenkov telescope. I then got a postdoc at MIT with Jacqueline Hewitt working on LOFAR and eventually the development of the MWA, and spent six years in Boston in a variety of postdoc and research scientist positions at both MIT and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics before joining the faculty at the University of Washington in 2008. 

• Cancer? Not all of the childhood moves were my parents’ fault. At the age of four while living in just post-Franco Spain, I was diagnosed with childhood kidney cancer (Wilm’s tumor). At the time the survival rates for childhood cancer were rapidly improving, particularly at US medical research centers. So on a week’s notice my Dad resigned his Fulbright lectureship and the family moved to San Francisco where I was treated as a Medicaid patient at UC Med Center. I underwent radiation treatment (Cobalt in Spain and a new LINAC in San Francisco); surgery to remove one kidney (no you can’t have the other); and 15 months of chemotherapy. It was an incredibly difficult time, particularly for my parents, and some of the pictures of me as a kid are scary. But kids are resilient. I was declared cured at 10, and thankfully have had no long term effects. 

• Family history on the cutting edge of technology? There are a number of family stories oddly involving technology. 

  • My grandfather Pete Morales was the first person in his family to graduate high school, and after serving in Europe during WWII was working as a night janitor at Kelley Air Force base when a standardized test was given looking for people to work on early computers. He was selected and worked his way up as a computer programmer and then manager for the Air Force. He talked about being sent to IBM to be trained in the brand-new COBOL language, and how revolutionary it was.

  • My grandfather Phillip Windrem was an astronomy enthusiast and land surveyor. He invented the celestial navigation globe. After manufacturing that did not work out, he became a land surveyor in rural California but was always at the technological edge. In particular he was the first person on the west coast to have a geodimeter that measured distance with light. I have inherited both his Curta calculator and his AGA Geodimeter Model 6, which I love to show students.

  • My parents Peter and Phyllis Morales were early pioneers in desktop publishing. My folks bought an Apple Macintosh within the first few weeks of its introduction in 1984, the first computer in our home. When they changed careers and started running a weekly newspaper in southern Oregon, they bought the newly announced Laser Printer and unintentionally became some the first practitioners of what became desktop publishing. Through high school and college I did a lot of newspaper and magazine design and consulted on desktop publishing transitions. I remember PageMaker 1.0, and the dramatic revolution desktop publishing made in the late ’80’s.

• Are you related to Spiderman? Despite superficial similarities to Miles Morales and Miguel O’Hara (and a fondness for spiders) there is no relation. And I’m afraid of heights.