He is Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was a composer in residence with the New England Philharmonic.
[3] He began attending Keele University in Staffordshire, England, but transferred to Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1973 in a junior-year exchange program.
[1] In 1981 he received his PhD in musical composition from Brandeis University,[3] where his teachers included Arthur Berger, Martin Boykan, and Seymour Shifrin.
[6] Child composes music for orchestra, chorus, computer synthesis, voice, and chamber groups.
[3] Child lives in Cambridge with his partner, the conceptual artist Lina Viste Grønli with whom he collaborated on the composition "Practicing Haydn" (along with Elaine Chew).