 There he studied quantum field theory with Professor Paul Dirac, founder of the field of quantum mechanics and holder of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Professor Erwin Schrödinger.McCormick returned to the U.S. to take his PhD in Physics at Harvard University in 1955, with the thesis "Two investigations in meson theory in the non-relativistic limit".He then became a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory.