David J. C. MacKay continued his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences (Experimental and theoretical physics) in 1988. He went to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a Fulbright Scholar, where his supervisor was John Hopfield. He was awarded a PhD in 1992. In January 1992 MacKay was appointed the Royal Society Smithson Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge, continuing his cross-disciplinary research in the Cavendish Laboratory, the Department of Physics of the University of Cambridge. In 1995 he was made a University Lecturer in the Cavendish Laboratory. He was promoted in 1999 to
Department of Physics, Lund University was conducted under the faculty of philosophy. In addition, during its first 150 years the University had no professorship in pure physics, so the teachings was instead given by professors in mathematics. There were however a course in experimental physics from the early 18th century, but that course was given by a professor in theoretical medicine; Kilian Stobæus was appointed as the first professor in 1728. It wasn't until the early 19th century that the physics professorship split from the mathematics, but then the professorship was shared with the astronomy. The University received its first full professor in physics in