McCormick took his BS in Physics from MIT in 1950, followed by two years on a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University, England.
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".
[1] In 1957 McCormick accepted a post as staff physicist at the Alvarez Hydrogen Bubble Chamber Group at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
In 1960 Dr. McCormick began 12 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was a professor of physics, computer science, and bioengineering.
In August 2005 Dr. McCormick retired from Texas A&M but continued his research there, exploring and understanding the complexity and scaling properties of the brain's microcircuit structure.