Phillip Mackey grew up and studied in Australia but made his metallurgical mark in Canada. He was a major force behind the development of two new processes used in smelters today to treat copper concentrates and recycled materials.  He earned his BSc (Hons) from the University of New South Wales in 1964 and completed his PhD at its School of Metallurgy in 1969. He then moved to Montreal to join the Noranda Research Centre. He played a major role in commercializing the Noranda Reactor Process, first implemented at the Horne smelter in Quebec in 1973 and then used elsewhere in the world. He later co-invented the Noranda Converting Process to improve the environmental performance of copper converters. The reactor process went on to treat so far an estimated 80 million tonnes of copper concentrate globally, while the converting process has produced more than five million tonnes of metallic copper since 2000. A Fellow of both CIM (Canada) and TMS (USA), Mackey received the Selwyn G. Blaylock Medal of CIM in 2010, The COM Silver Medal in 2006, and in 2012, he won the Airey Award, the most prestigious award for a metallurgist in Canada. Mackey is a co-founder of the Copper-Cobre conferences, which expanded from a joint Canadian-Chilean enterprise to embrace the entire global copper industry. Mackey is on the Board of Hazen Research of Denver, USA. The Phillip Mackey Symposium was held in his honour at the 2019 Copper Conference in Vancouver. He presented the TMS Extractive & Processing Division Distinguished Lecture in 2020 and received the John Elliott Lectureship Award of the Association for Iron and Steel Technology for 2021-2022. He was a Distinguished Lecturer for CIM in 2022-2023. He was inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame in 2022 for his work on copper and nickel.

He formed his own consulting company after leaving Xstrata and this has led to a wide range of projects worldwide, including work on the development of new nickel projects and nickel-copper projects. He sees Canada entering a new era for investment and development in mining and metallurgical projects; using his wide store of knowledge in mining and metallurgy, Mackey is helping to grow new projects in Canada.