Staff spotlight: Mackenzie Keyse

Educational background

Mackenzie grew up in southern California in a small part of Los Angeles close to the Port of LA. She moved to the Bay Area for college, receiving her bachelor’s degree in public health from UC Berkeley.

Seeking to explore more of the US, she moved to Massachusetts for graduate school and enrolled in the Master of Public Health program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). While quickly feeling at home and enjoying her studies, she admits that her first northeast winter came as quite a shock.

While at UMass, she focused her coursework on global health and health education/communication and worked as graduate teaching assistant for an undergrad public health course. Throughout her two-year program, she was fortunate to intern with a local organization that sponsored health education programs in Ghana and India. In this role, Mackenzie made two trips to Dominase, Ghana and one trip to Ahmedabad, India where she helped to oversee programs in which US students were able to learn from and partner with Ghanaian students and Indian healthcare professionals.

“It was an amazing privilege to be able to visit these beautiful counties and learn from these communities,” Mackenzie said. “I am so lucky to have made lifelong memories and lasting relationships with my colleagues from this program. Little did I know that my decision to move to the other side of the country would also allow me to experience new cultures across the globe.”

After graduating from UMass, Mackenzie moved to Boston and joined the program staff of the Internal Medicine Residency Program at Boston Medical Center and later became the communications manager for the Boston Medical Center/Boston University Department of Medicine. 

Communications

Mackenzie and her partner moved to Seattle in the fall of 2019 and she joined the UW Department of Medicine as a communications specialist in the spring of 2020.

“I couldn’t have been more excited to join the Department of Medicine at UW, especially early in the Covid-19 pandemic. I was welcomed by an amazing team, just as we all were settling into working from home.”

Mackenzie said this was also an interesting time to join the team as the department was about to undergo a sweeping website update. Between 2021 and early 2023, Mackenzie and her colleagues manually migrated and reformatted all of the department’s over 50 websites to the redesigned framework and trained division site managers in the new editing procedures. She continues creating content for various websites and supports site managers as they develop content on their own.

Among various ongoing projects, Mackenzie developed and manages the Department of Medicine Intranet on SharePoint, which serves as a guidebook for faculty, staff and trainees to navigate important topics. She has also helped several divisions and programs create their own SharePoint sites for internal-facing content.

She particularly enjoys creating digital media for the department’s social media accounts, websites and internal platforms. Without much prior experience in graphic design, she continually seeks to learn new design programs and improve her stylistic technique. She loves to create video content and has worked with several groups to script and record videos and then edited the footage into a cohesive story.

“I love being able to help increase visibility of and recognition for our department’s many innovative programs, initiatives and people,” Mackenzie said. “It is also a really satisfying process creating visual assets that not only help make our work stand out but aim to make us uniquely identifiable.”

Hobbies and Interests

Mackenzie is a member of the Salmon Bay Eagles Club, a service organization devoted to supporting local charities and known within the Seattle blues community for hosting live local bands on a weekly basis. She has held several officer positions within the club including membership on the board of trustees, vice president and most recently serving as president from 2023-2024. 

She enjoys yoga, tennis, travelling and spending time with her family (“especially [her] nieces and nephews”). Lately, she and her fiancée, Chris, have been busy planning their wedding which will take place late next summer.

She also has a hidden talent that she has been practicing since high school.

“I learned how to solve a Rubik’s cube when I was 16 and I even took a ‘speed cubing’ elective for a semester in college in which we practiced to solve it in under a minute. I can proudly say that I can still do it, though now it may take me a few seconds longer than it used to.”