Miller Puckette won Putnam and NSF fellowships to study mathematics at MIT and Harvard, where he finished his Ph.D. in 1986. From 1979 through 1986 he also worked on real-time techniques for live music performance at the MIT Media Lab. He then joined IRCAM where he wrote Max, a seminal computer music environment. In 1994 Puckette joined UCSD where he is now professor and Chair of the music department, and is developing a new software environment for computer music named Pure Data.