| Michael C. Mackey | |
| Birth Date: | November 16, 1942 |
| Birth Place: | Kansas City, Kansas, United States |
| Occupation: | Professor, researcher |
| Alma Mater: | University of Kansas University of Washington |
| Doctoral Advisor: | J. Walter Woodbury |
| Workplaces: | National Institutes of Health McGill University |
| Awards: | Forschungspreis, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (1987) |
Michael C. Mackey 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]
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.
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]