While attending Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, Kaku assembled a particle accelerator in his parents' garage for a science fair project. His admitted goal was to generate "a beam of gamma rays powerful enough to create antimatter." At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated summa cum laude at Harvard University in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972, and that same year held a lectureship at Princeton University