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
UH Physics Department 2000. His PhD thesis (1985-1990) was on statistical mechanics of commensurate-incommensurate phase transitions under the supervision of Robert Griffiths. Prof. Simon Charles Moss joined the physics department in 1972 performin research on the full gamut of materials from hetero- structures and multilayers to quasi-crystals and decagonal crystals using x-ray and neutron scattering as probes of order in matter. He died of a heart attack on 14 March 2011. UH Physics Department The Department of Physics at the is a department of the University of Houston College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics performing research traditional fields such as High Energy Physics