In 1970, Cowie graduated from the
University of Edinburgh with a BSc with
First Class Honours. He then graduated from
Harvard University with a Ph.D in theoretical physics in 1976. As a post-doc, he was at
Princeton University, where he became an associate professor in 1979. In 1980, he was a Fairchild Scholar at
California Institute of Technology. Beginning in 1980, he was a professor at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from 1983 at the
Space Telescope Science Institute. In 1984, Cowie became a professor at
Johns Hopkins University and then in 1986 a professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi, where he was also associate director 1986 to 1997. Cowie's research deals with the dynamics of interstellar and intergalactic gas. At the University of Hawaiʻi, he investigated, with the telescope on
Mauna Kea and with the
Hubble Space Telescope, the oldest stars and galaxies in the universe and their formation and early development. ==Awards and honours==