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
University of Chicago Studies. The university currently enrolls 5,971 undergraduate students and 16,016 students overall. University of Chicago scholars have played a major role in the development of many academic disciplines, including sociology, law, economics, literary criticism, religion and the behavioralism school of political science. Chicago's physics department and the Met Lab helped develop the world's first man-made, self-sustaining nuclear reaction (Chicago Pile-1) beneath the viewing stands of university's Stagg Field, a key part of the classified Manhattan Project effort of World War II. The university research efforts include administration of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, as well as the