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
Clarendon Laboratory Clarendon Laboratory The Clarendon Laboratory, located on Parks Road with the Science Area in Oxford, England (not to be confused with the Clarendon Building, also in Oxford), is part of the Department of Physics at Oxford University. It houses the atomic and laser physics, condensed matter physics, and biophysics groups within the Department, although four other Oxford Physics groups are not based in the Clarendon Lab. The Oxford Centre for Quantum Computation is also housed in the laboratory. The Clarendon Laboratory consists of two adjoining buildings, the Lindemann Building (named after Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell) and the Grade II