[12] MacKenzie was educated Hutchesons' Grammar School in Glasgow[4] and the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1986.

[13] Mackenzie is a world leading authority in strongly-correlated systems and renowned for his pioneering experiments in this area.

[1] His contributions to this new field of condensed matter physics have been comprehensive, ranging from the growth of the world's highest purity crystals of the materials of interest to the development of techniques for performing extremely high resolution transport and thermodynamic measurements at ultra-low temperatures.

[1] He is also leading the way in developing surface-sensitive spectroscopies as future high precision probes of the correlated systems and as part of the long-term quest to see them used in a new generation of quantum electronics.

He was a co-recipient of the 2004 Daiwa Adrian Prize[1] and recipient of the 2011 Mott Medal[2] of the Institute of Physics, and held a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) from 1993 to 2001[where?]