Prof. David MacKay, Physicist, University Cambridge, and Chief Scientific Advisor, UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, London, will present the 4th Goldstein Architecture, Engineering, and Science Lecture. About the Speaker: Appointed in October 2009 as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Prof. MacKay's role is to ensure that the department's policies and operations and its contributions to wider Government issues, are underpinned by the best science and engineering advice available.

David MacKay studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College, he then went to Caltech to complete a PhD in Computation and Neural Systems. In 1992 he returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. In 1995 he became a university lecturer in the Department of Physics, where he was promoted in 1999 to a Readership and in 2003 to a Professorship in Natural Philosophy. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2009.

David MacKay's research interests include reliable computation with unreliable hardware, and communication systems for the disabled. He believes that what the climate-change discussion needs is clear, simple numbers, so that we can understand just how big our challenge is, and not be conned by grand-sounding schemes that don't actually work. He has also written a book on the subject Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air (UIT Cambridge, 2009).

Event co-sponsored by the Department of Architecture and the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).