Professor Morris is trained as a physical chemist and currently works as a planetary scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Morris has participated in analysis of extraterrestrial materials and has been involved in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (Spirit and Opportunity) as a science team member, focusing on Moessbauer Spectrometer measurements related to iron oxidation state and mineralogy of regolith and rocks. He is currently a Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity Rover) CheMin Co-Investigator and works on the inferred soil and rock mineralogy from this X-ray transmission diffractometer instrument. Morris works closely with Professors Arvidson, Catalano, and Jolliff on the chemistry and mineralogy of Martian materials and inferred current and past environmental conditions.