Sir David MacKay, British author, scientist and professor, Died at 48

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Sir David John Cameron MacKay was born on April 22, 1967, and died on April 14, 2016.

He was the Regius Professor of Engineering.

He worked in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and from 2009 to 2014 was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

Before he was officially appointed to the DECC, MacKay was most well known as author of the book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air.

He received his education at Newcastle High School (later Newcastle-under-Lyme School) and represented Britain in the International Physics Olympiad in Yugoslavia in 1985, receiving the first prize for experimental work.

He then went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, and received a Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences (Experimental and theoretical physics) in 1988.

David MacKay went to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a Fulbright Scholar.

David’s supervisor in the graduate programme in Computation and Neural Systems was John Hopfield.

in 1992, Sir David was awarded his PhD.

In January 1992 MacKay was made 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, David MacKay was made a University Lecturer in the Cavendish Laboratory.

During 1999, Sir David MacKay was promoted to a Readership, in 2003 to a Professorship in Natural Philosophy and in 2013 to the post of Regius Professorship of Engineering.

In May 2009,David MacKay was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society

His parents were Donald MacCrimmon MacKay and Valerie MacKay.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009.

Sir David MacKay was knighted in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to scientific advice in government and to science outreach.

David MacKay passed away at 48 yrs old.