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CAIMS*SCMAI Research Prize 2006
Winner and Citation
Dr. Michael C. Mackey, Department of
Physiology, McGill University.
Michael C.
Mackey, Joseph Morley Drake Professor of Physiology at McGill
University, is recognized for his seminal contributions to the
advancement of biomathematics, in particular for his groundbreaking
efforts to model haematopoiesis, and his co-invention of the concept
of dynamical diseases (abnormalities in the underlying control
mechanisms of a physiological system - from a mathematical point of
view, a dynamical disease can be interpreted as a bifurcation induced
by a change in the value of one or more of the regulating parameters,
not in an anatomical dysfunction). In his groundbreaking 1977 Science
paper, co-authored with Leon Glass, he introduced the concept,
illustrated it on two specific examples, and also provided numerical
evidence for irregular oscillations in a first order delay differential
equation: this highly original observation eventually lead to the
establishment of the so-called Mackey-Glass equation as a paradigmatic
chaotic dynamical system (The related Glass-Mackey attractor appeared
in 1979 in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences as an example
of a system in a chaotic regime).
Building from this phenomenological equation, M. Mackey has been
expanding, refining and developing models of growing sophistication,
realism and complexity to represent the haematopoietic system, training
numerous graduate students and postdoctoral fellows along the way. At
each step, physiological considerations were paramount in exploiting
the similarities as well as the differences in the three lineages : red
blood cells, platelets and white blood cells. In reflecting the
underlying physiology, these models take the form of systems of
stage-structured differential equations, typically reduced to systems
of delay differential equations, often with state-dependent delays.
For more than three decades, Dr. Mackey has been keeping a dialogue
with experimentalists and clinical investigators to incorporate the
most current biological knowledge in his models, most recently,
cellular and molecular discoveries on apoptosis and gene regulatory
functions.
Dr. Mackey is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was an
exchange fellow of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a recipient of
Forschungspreise by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and the
Leverhulm Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford. |
