Digby D. Macdonald is a native of New Zealand, a naturalized US citizen, and is a Professor in Residence (semi-retired) in the Departments of Nuclear Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.  He holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Auckland and a Ph. D. from the University of Calgary (1969), all in Chemistry.

He specializes in the growth and point defect structures of thin oxide films on metal surfaces under extreme environmental conditions and developed the Point Defect Model for describing the physico-electrochemistry of such systems.  He has also developed the modern theory of stress corrosion cracking, corrosion fatigue, and pitting corrosion in terms of the deterministic Coupled Environment Models and is a pioneer in the modern form of Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy.

One of his major activities has been the modeling of the electrochemical and corrosion properties of structural materials in the coolant circuits of operating, water-cooled nuclear power reactors and recently modeled for DOE the coolant circuit of the ITER that is currently being built in Cadarache, France.  ITER is the World’s first fusion technology demonstration reactor.  He has also contributed to developing the science base for the disposal of High-Level Nuclear Waste in the US (Yucca Mountain), Belgium, and Sweden.

Recently, he examined the ice-core data from Greenland and Antarctica and concluded that the relationship proposed in the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hypothesis that atmospheric CO₂ is responsible for global warming violates the Causality Principle and hence lacks a valid scientific basis because the excursion in temperature precedes the excursion in the concentration of CO₂.

Prof. Macdonald has published more than 1000 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings and has published four books.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Society of New Zealand (the “National Academies” of those countries) and is a Member of the EU Academy of Sciences.  He enjoys a H-index of 71 and his papers have been cited over 16,167 times.