Harry Lee Morrison, 69; UC Dean an Advocate for Minorities in Math

Harry Lee Morrison, 69, a physicist and associate dean at UC Berkeley who was known as a strong advocate for women and minorities in mathematics, died Monday at his Berkeley home. The cause of death was not disclosed.

Morrison taught physics at Berkeley for 22 years until his retirement from the faculty in 1994. He continued to serve as an assistant dean in the undergraduate advising office of the College of Letters and Science, a position he held for 11 years.

As the only African American professor on the physics faculty, he was a natural magnet for minority students in the department and unofficially advised many of them. He helped develop the nationally recognized MESA (Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement) program, launched in 1970, to boost minority enrollment in college. His specialty within theoretical physics was statistical mechanics. He studied the behavior of fluids when the temperature drops low enough for them to become so-called superfluids and wrote or co-wrote many papers on the movement of particles in superfluid systems.

Born in Arlington, Va., Morrison earned a bachelor’s degree in 1955 and a doctorate in 1960 from Catholic University of America in Washington. He taught physics at the Air Force Academy and worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before joining the UC Berkeley faculty in 1972.