While attending Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, Kaku assembled a particle accelerator in his parents' garage for a science fair project.[citation needed] 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 from 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.
As part of the research program in 1975 and 1977 at the department of physics at The City College of The City University of New York, Kaku worked on research on quantum mechanics.
He was a Visitor and Member (1973 and 1990) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and New York University. He currently holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York.
Kaku has had more than 70 articles published in physics journals such as Physical Review, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. In 1974, Kaku and Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University co-authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form