NORTH DAKOTA STATE UNIVERSITY - FARGO, ND
Graduating from NDSU in 1974 with a B.S. in Physics and then earning a M.S. and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, George T. Gillies is co-inventor of fourteen issued patents and the inventor/co-inventor of an additional 50 related patent disclosures largely in the fields of medical and biomedical engineering, with several of them being for the development of innovative catheters used in neurosurgical procedures. While attending NDSU he served as President of the Blue Key Fraternity and was active in various organizations including Pi Kappa Delta, Sigma Pi Sigma, Student Senate, Lincoln Debate Society, and the Newman Center.
Gillies’ work in the field of physics enabled him to travel worldwide and work at several prestigious organizations including the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France, the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University and the Institute of Physics in Great Britain, and the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics of the University of Trieste as well as the International School of Gravitational Physics, both in Italy, and universities in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia.
Although many have benefited from Gillies innovations in technology, it is his work at the University of Virginia that he is most noted for. Twenty years of research by him, his colleagues and their students, to help doctors who treat brain diseases, has resulted in the team’s development of several useful medical instrumentation systems, including the magnetically guided catheter system, which has now been used successfully on thousands of patients. This work has had an important impact on how interventional procedures are carried out in medicine. He is a co-founder of Stereotaxis, Inc. and NexGen Medical Systems, Inc.
Gillies, a native of Rugby, North Dakota, and his wife, Melanie, have a grown daughter Olivia, and reside in Charlottesville, Virginia. In his free time Gillies enjoys long distance running, studying modern languages, fishing with his former NDSU Debate Team partners in Wisconsin, and working on his sculpture garden.