MacKenzie is a psychologist who studies individual differences and contextual changes associated with physical health, cognitive function, and well-being across the lifespan. To advance knowledge in these areas, she uses cross-sectional, longitudinal, and intensive measurement designs as well as statistical techniques for examining change and intraindividual variability. Her projects use ecological momentary assessment and daily diary designs to repeatedly assess daily experiences (e.g., psychological states, stressor exposure) in real-time within individuals’ natural environments. Her subject areas of expertise include lifespan development and cognitive aging, lifestyle and behavioral interventions to optimize cognitive function, and age-related change in stress and well-being.

At NORC, MacKenzie supports projects focused on advancing health equity and improving health care quality while lowering costs. She provides technical assistance support to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Office of Minority Health. For NORC’s Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee (PTAC) support contract with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), MacKenzie provides analytics support for regular PTAC learning sessions exploring topics related to modernizing traditional fee-for-service reimbursement for care. For example, she supported learning sessions focused on addressing the needs of patients with complex chronic conditions or serious illnesses in population-based total cost of care (PB-TCOC) models, developing and implementing performance measures for PB-TCOC models, improving care transition management within PB-TCOC models, and integrating specialty care in PB-TCOC models.

Prior to joining NORC, MacKenzie worked in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington where she supported projects focused on implementing and disseminating evidence-based practices for adults with serious mental illness. She also worked in the School of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she designed and coordinated memory intervention studies including a randomized controlled trial funded by the National Institute on Aging. Her research also focused on understanding age differences in the impact of daily stressor exposure on key stress hormones, memory, and psychological well-being. She also completed an internship in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health where she supported a project funded by the National Cancer Institute that examined the impact of using culturally tailored inoculation messaging on resistance to tobacco marketing among young adult sexual minorities.

MacKenzie’s diverse set of research publications span topics related to daily experiences, cognitive aging, and implementation science. Her publications on everyday activities and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic include age differences in risk and resilience factors in COVID-19-related stress (2020); the impact of experiencing and forecasting daily stress on mental health reactivity across age and race (2022); mental health challenges among healthcare professionals during the pandemic (2020); predictors of precautionary health behaviors to prevent illness (2023); and the impact of anxiety and proactive coping on vaccine hesitancy (2023).

In collaboration with researchers at universities across the United States, she conducted a coordinated analysis exploring age differences in social interactions and loneliness during the pandemic (2024). Findings from her work focused on cognitive function among older adults have described the effect of perceptions of task difficulty on cognitive effort (2024); the relationship between state anxiety and cortisol responses during cognitive testing (2020); fostering self-management of everyday memory in older adults (2021); and initial evidence for an Everyday Memory and Metacognitive Intervention (2020).

MacKenzie has also published findings from her work supporting the implementation and dissemination of evidence-based practices, including applying the Project ECHO Model to support implementation and sustainment of cognitive behavioral therapy for psychosis (CBTp) (2022); statewide implementation of CBTp using a learning collaborative model (2019); and qualitative findings from implementing Illness Management and Recovery within Assertive Community Treatment teams (2020). She has also published qualitative findings on improving dissemination products and practices for community-based organizations serving LGBTQ+ communities (in press).