Medical Devices



Challenge Area Goals

  • Develop an understanding of medical problems that can potentially be helped with medical devices
  • Invent, design, build, enhance and test medical devices

  • Make the translation of medical devices to the clinic more efficient, effective and safe

Chairman, co-founder and co-inventor of TomoTherapy Inc. and a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of medical physics at the School of Medicine and Public Health and biomedical engineering in the College of Engineering, the focus of Rock Mackie’s area is to explore and build medical devices with the potential to treat or cure medical conditions in patients and to improve the movement of new devices from research lab to clinical use. This area will be the most closely integrated with UW-Madison and in many ways its translational emphasis has been modeled on the successful Coulter Foundation Program at the university’s department of biomedical engineering. Mackie’s plans include a facility for rapid prototyping and the launch of a medical devices consortium through partnerships with companies and academia.

“The medical devices research effort in Madison and the upper Midwest has achieved a significant critical mass. At Morgridge we hope to catalyze pivotal translational and transformational research in this field to make medical devices to this region what computers and software have been to Silicon Valley.”

– T. Rock Mackie