Michael Mackey

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Michael C. Mackey FRSC
Born	November 16, 1942 Kansas City, Kansas, United States
Alma mater	University of Kansas University of Washington
Occupation(s)	Professor, researcher
Awards	Forschungspreis, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (1987)
Scientific career
Institutions	National Institutes of Health McGill University
Doctoral advisor	J. Walter Woodbury

Michael C. Mackey FRSC is a Canadian-American biomathematician and Professor in the Department of Physiology of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada who holds the Joseph Morley Drake Emeritus Chair.^[1][2]

Biography

He received a Bachelor of Arts (BA, 1963) in Mathematics from the University of Kansas and completed a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D., 1968) in Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington.^[1]

He became a professor in the Department of Physiology at McGill University, as well as Director of the Centre for Applied Mathematics in Bioscience and Medicine and the Mathematical Physiology Laboratory.^[3]

In 1999, he was elected a fellow^[4] of the Royal Society of Canada in the Academy of Science. He is a Fellow^[5] of the American Physical Society (2006), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics^[6] (SIAM, 2009) and the Society for Mathematical Biology^[7] (2017). He was awarded a Forschungspreis by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation^[8] at Bremen University in 1993, and a Doctorat honoris causa by the Universite de Lyon^[9] in 2010 and the University of Silesia^[10] in 2019, and was the Leverhulme Professor of Mathematical Biology at University of Oxford in 2001-2002.

Research

His research focuses on the development of mathematical models, such as the Mackey-Glass equations,^[11] to describe physiological processes at the cellular and molecular levels as well as foundational questions in physics related to the nature of irreversibility, entropy, and the arrow of time. He developed,^[12] with Leon Glass, the concept of dynamical disease in which a parameter change in a physiological control system is hypothesized to lead to pathological behavior, and the use of chaos theory to investigate such possibilities. ^[1]