The author

Sustainable Energy – without the hot air

David JC MacKay

The author, July 2008. Photo by David Stern.

About the author

David MacKay is a Professor was a Professor ¹ in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. He is internationally known for his research in machine learning, information theory, and communication systems, including the invention of Dasher, a software interface that enables efficient communication in any language with any muscle. He has taught taught Physics in Cambridge since 1995. Since 2005, he has devoted devoted much of his time to public teaching about energy. He is a member of , including a term (2009–2014, after this book's original publication) as Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. He was a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Climate Change.

Updates, 2026

Footnotes

1. David MacKay's death. This page's biography was written in the present tense in 2008 and left unedited since. MacKay died in April 2016, aged 48. He had served as the UK government's Chief Scientific Advisor for Energy and Climate Change from 2009 to 2014, a role that postdates this book's original publication. This site's about page already notes his death; this page did not, until now. Source: University of Cambridge; UK Government. ↩