He has written publications about information retrieval, algorithms, parallel computing, cryptography, and number theory.
[3] When he was a child, McCurley had built model planes and cars, and he enjoyed making things with his hands.
[1] His dissertation in analytic number theory was titled Explicit Estimates for Functions of Primes in Arithmetic Progressions, and his advisor was Paul Trevier Bateman.
[5][6][better source needed] After he was a post-doc at Michigan State University, McCurley took a job at USC (Los Angeles), where he published some papers with Leonard Adleman about algorithms and complexity.
], McCurley worked at IBM Almaden Research Center, Sandia National Laboratories, and at the University of Southern California.