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
Cavendish Professor of Physics something of a contradiction, dressing as a Victorian gentleman but working on the cutting edge of physics. Rutherford died suddenly in 1937, marking the end of an era for the Cavendish. Sir Lawrence Bragg became Cavendish Professor just before the outbreak of the Second World War, which resulted in many staff joining various defence research establishments, notably to develop radar. Work on neutron physics performed at this time was translated into the Manhattan Project to build an atom bomb. In 1971 it was renamed from the "Cavendish Professorship of Experimental Physics" to the "Cavendish Professorship of Physics". Until Brian Pippard