Michael Mackey

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.

Biography

He received a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from the University of Kansas and completed a Doctor of Philosophy in Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington.
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.
In 1999, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in the Academy of Science. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Society for [Mathematical Biology]. He was awarded a Forschungspreis by the at Bremen University in 1993, and a Doctorat honoris causa by the Universite de Lyon in 2010 and the University of Silesia 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, 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, 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.