Professor Cathleen Morawetz was born in Toronto, Canada. From 1943 to 1944 she worked in Quebec for the Inspection Board of the United Kingdom and Canada testing shells. She completed her B.A. in Toronto in 1945, received a master's degree from MIT in 1946 and a Ph.D. in 1951 on implosions from New York University (NYU) under the direction of Kurt Friedrichs. From 1950 to 1951 she did postdoctoral work on hydrodynamic stability with Professor Chia-Chiao Lin at MIT. From 1951 to 1993 she was on the staff and later on the faculty of what became the Courant Institute at NYU. She was the Director from 1984 to 1988 and is now Professor Emerita. In 1998 Professor Morawetz received the President's Medal of Sciences (USA) and in 2006 the Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She served as President of the AMS in 1995-6.

Professor Morawetz's mathematical work has been in linear and nonlinear partial differential equations, particularly the equations of mixed type which govern transonic flow and those of hyperbolic type which govern wave propagation and scattering theory. She has also worked in plasma physics.