free online. In March 2012 he gave a TED talk on renewable energy. MacKay was appointed to be Chief Scientific Advisor of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, United Kingdom, in September 2009. In October 2014, at the end of his five-year term, he was succeeded by John Loughhead. Awards and honours MacKay was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009. His certificate of election reads: In the 2016 New Year Honours, MacKay was appointed a Knight Bachelor "for services to Scientific Advice in Government and Science Outreach", and therefore granted the title sir. Personal life David MacKay was born the fifth child of Donald MacCrimmon MacKay and Valerie MacKay. His elder brother Robert S. MacKay FRS (born in 1956) is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick. David was a vegetarian. He married Ramesh Ghiassi in 2011. They had a son and a daughter. Illness and death MacKay was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer (malignant adenocarcinoma) in July 2015, for which he underwent palliative chemotherapy, a process he documented in detail on his public personal blog. He died in the afternoon of 14 April 2016. He is survived by his wife and two children. References 1967 births 2016 deaths British physicists British information theorists Natural philosophers Professors of engineering (Cambridge) Fellows of Darwin College, Cambridge Fellows of the Royal Society Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge People from Stoke-on-Trent British non-fiction writers People educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme School Fellows of the Institute of Physics California Institute of Technology alumni British male writers Knights Bachelor Male non-fiction writers Regius Professors Fulbright alumni