“Rock” Mackie has a BSc in Physics (1980) from the University of Saskatchewan and a Ph.D. in Physics (1984) from the University of Alberta. In 1987, he left Canada and came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and became a full professor in 1998 in the Department of Medical Physics. He was at the UW-Madison for 22 years and supervised more than 40 Ph.D. students, co-authored more than 180 peer-reviewed publications and an inventor on 50 US patents. He has been a UW Professor Emeritus since 2012 and an Emeritus Investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research since 2015.
Rock Mackie has co-founded several not-for-profit and for-profit organizations. He is a co-founder and Chairman of the Board for the Center for the Assessment of Radiological Sciences (CARS), a not-for-profit organization supporting quality in radiation oncology and radiology. He was a co-founder of the Advocacy Consortium for Entrepreneurs (ACE), an independent association of faculty, staff and trainees promoting academic entrepreneurship at the UW-Madison. ACE merged with WiSolve an organization of entrepreneurial graduate student and post-doctoral trainees that also provide business consulting services. In 1992, he co-founded Geometrics Corporation to develop the Pinnacle radiotherapy treatment planning system based on 3D CT scans, which originated from his clinical and research work. Now owned by Philips Medical Corporation, it was once the largest selling radiation therapy treatment planning system in the world. In 1997, Rock co-founded TomoTherapy in 1997, a CT image-guided intensity-modulated radiotherapy company and was its Chairman of the Board from founding to IPO and on to sale to Accuray Corporation in 2011.
He is a co-founder and Chairman of the Board of several companies including HealthMyne, a company mining data from medical images, Asto CT, a veterinary CT scanner company, OnLume a fluorescent-guided surgery company, and Linectra a metal additive manufacturing company. He is also a board member of Shine Medical Technologies and BioIonix. Dr. Mackie is now the Chief Innovation Officer at UW Health and the Director of the Isthmus Project, an innovation and commercialization initiative of UW Health and UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
About UW Health
UW Health is the integrated health system of the University of Wisconsin-Madison serving more than 600,000 patients each year in the Upper Midwest and beyond with approximately 1,500 physicians and 16,500 staff at six hospitals and more than 80 outpatient sites. UW Health is governed by the UW Hospitals and Clinics Authority and partners with UW School of Medicine and Public Health to fulfill their patient care, research, education, and community service missions.
About the Isthmus Project
The Isthmus Project, supported by UW Health and the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, serves as a new business and innovation accelerator. The program’s goal is to provide the opportunity for health system innovators to seek support for their creative ideas and projects that aim to achieve better health outcomes or to solve problems facing UW Health patients, providers and the health system. Beyond the primary goal, they also seek projects that are scalable to create value beyond UW Health and UW-Madison.