[3][4] Born in London, United Kingdom, M'Pherson was educated as an engineer at Oxford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[5] He started his career as "hard-hat practitioner"[6] at the Royal Navy, where he became gunnery engineer officer specialized in fire-control systems.
In 1955 he was sent to MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory run by Charles Stark Draper to work on the development of Inertial navigation systems sharing ideas with pioneers as Norbert Wiener and Harold Chestnut.
[5] Early 1960s M'Pherson left the Royal Navy and started for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, where he founded a research group focussed on the controlling of nuclear power reactors.
They particularly focussed on "constructing mathematical models of nuclear reactor spatial dynamics using early digital computers with punched tape input-output.