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
Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particles Physics with the University of Coimbra, the Lisbon University, the Technical University of Lisbon, the New University of Lisbon, the University of the Minho and the University of Beira Interior. LIP is involved in scientific research on issues related to high energy physics and instrumentation, working heavily with CERN, of which Portugal is a full member. LIP has also been involved in space science projects with NASA, the Pierre Auger Observatory, the SNOLAB, and the European Space Agency, and conducts research in Monte Carlo methods for medical physics. The laboratory is also involved in the Ibercivis distributed computing project. Laboratory of