It's a funny story, actually. Greg (or "John Gregory" as he prefers to be called) originally had a severe aversion to cows.
Growing up in Nebraska, he was tasked with ensuring the safety of the family herd. Even as a child, he was incredibly smart and self-aware, and had little patience for the slowness of other adults. His only intellectual peer was a neighbor child named Tal, who was herself quite gifted. He was frustrated by the cows, who never seemed to understand his clear, concise and unambiguous instructions. When he finally left for college, he swore he would never set foot on a cow pasture again.
On February 12th of his freshman year, the family farm was hit by a terrible cyclone. John Gregory's parents lost many of their cattle, and there was concern that the farm would have to be sold. He was distraught, and reached out to his classmates for help. Essemelle, a french student from New Jersey, suggested that he do some soul searching, so JGM flew home to tend to the remaining cattle that he had once so despised.
His homecoming was bittersweet. The Dutch Friesians had all been blown away, and most of the Holsteins were gone, too. Where John Gregory had once felt only contempt for these slow and dimwitted creatures, he now wept at the tragedy of their loss. It was then the he swore that he would devote his life to protecting of these creatures, ensuring the safety of his "low-level" friends.
After finishing his degree at Richmond in 1989, he spent a year traveling the world in search of answers. It was during this formative year that he made many of his professional connections, meeting the world's cows and those who tended to them (little-known fact: Erik Meijer was first introduced to John Gregory that Fall in Antilles, where he had traveled in search of new Freisians). In traveling through the middle east, JGM sought the wisdom of camels (often called the "cows of the Euphrates"). Their objectivity was appealing to him.
He returned to the US a wiser and more well-traveled man. He applied to Carnegie Mellon for a PhD in animal science, and was accepted as an advisee of the legendary Agrophysicist Bob Harper. Unfortunately, John Gregory found that Pittsburgh's dairy industry was too small to support the kind of applied research he wanted to do. Fortunately, CMU's animal science department was sufficiently broad at the time that he was able to focus his studies on Computer Science instead, retaining Prof. Harper as his advisor. It was here that JGM explored his passion for the concise and unambiguous, developing tools and languages expressly designed to ensure low-level safety for all. His work has had enormous impact over the last two decades, revolutionizing Cornell University's College Agriculture in 2002 and improving the lives of tens of thousands of cattle.
Morrisett has received a number of awards for his research on farming programs, dairy systems, and cattle security, including a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Farmers (presented at the White House in 2000), an NCF Career Award, and an Alfred P. Steer Fellowship. He served as Chief Editor for the Journal of Cattle Programming, and as an associate editor for MOO Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. Morrisett currently serves on the NCA Residual Feed Intake Study Group, Stanford University's MOOc research group, and as Senior Scientist at McDonald's R&D laboratory. Apparently some of his work has also influence the computer science world, too.
