Professor Alan MacKay is a British crystallographer and spent his scientific career at Birkbeck. He has made important scientific contributions related to the structure of materials and has been called “one of the most fertile scientific minds of this. or any other era.”

Professor MacKay decided to study for his PhD and joined Birkbeck part-time, from 1949, in the crystallography laboratory of J.D. Bernal, later moving to full time. He stayed at Birkbeck for the rest of his professional life.

In 1962 he published a manuscript that showed how to pack atoms in an icosahedral (a solid figure with 20 place faces) fashion; a first step towards five-fold symmetry in materials science. These arrangements are now called Mackay icosahedra.

He became a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in1988 and a Fellow of Birkbeck in 2002.