George T. Gillies, Ph.D.

Research Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering
University of Virginia

George T. Gillies, Ph.D., is a native of North Dakota. He attended North Dakota State University, receiving a B.S. in physics in 1974. He then attended the University of Virginia, receiving an M.S. and Ph.D. in engineering physics in 1976 and 1980, respectively. After serving as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Virginia and the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, he accepted a position as a physicist with the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, France. In 1983, Gillies returned to the U.S. and worked for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Complex until 1985, when he became a faculty member of the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is presently a research professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering and a visiting research professor of physics at U.Va. and a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Gillies’ research interests include medical device development and precision measurement technology. More specifically, they include magnetic guidance systems for medical implants, design of catheters for positive pressure infusion systems, novel methods for delivering therapies into brain tumors, design of instrumentation systems for epicardial electrophysiology, and the development and testing of neurosurgical instrumentation. He has experience as an academic entrepreneur, having co-founded Stereotaxis Inc., NexGen Medical Systems Inc. and EpiEP Inc. He was the U.Va. Patent Foundation’s 2006 Edlich-Henderson Inventor of the Year and holds several patents for medical devices, thermal metrology instrumentation and other types of medical, scientific and engineering technologies. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. He was also the co-recipient of the ASME Lewis F. Moody Award for Fluids Engineering in 2003 and the recipient of the NDSU Alumni Achievement Award in 2007, and he is the deputy editor of the Institute of Physics journal, Reports on Progress in Physics.