Margaret Tolbert

Margaret Tolbert

Margaret Ellen Mayo Tolbert (born November 24, 1943) is a biochemist who worked as a professor and director of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee University, and was an administrative chemist at British Petroleum. From 1996-2002 she served as director of the New Brunswick Laboratory, becoming the first African American and the first woman in charge of a Department of Energy lab.

Early life and education

Margaret was born in Suffolk, Virginia to Jessie Clifford "Clifton" and Martha Taylor Artis Mayo, and raised by her grandmother after her mother died. She and her five siblings were kept together in spite of financial difficulties. Tolbert was no stranger to drive - she walked two miles to reach junior high school but that did not stop her from being the top in her class. Her hard work continued through high school during which her father died and her grandmother got sick. She worked as a maid to help her family while she took advanced placement classes.

Margaret enrolled in the Tuskegee Institute after graduating from East Suffolk High School as a chemistry major, an action enabled primarily by the availability of financial aid. While enrolled at Tuskegee University, she was a member of the honors program. She graduated in 1967 with a B.S. degree in chemistry and a minor in mathematics.

Margaret was a student research assistant under the mentorship of C.J. Smith and L.F.Koons of the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) Department of Chemistry, and she also participated in summer research at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Central State University. At ANL, she studied the resistance of chemicals in solution and analytics of uranium. She earned her master's degree in analytical chemistry from Wayne State University and her doctorate degree in biochemistry from Brown University where she conducted research on signal conduction in rat liver cells. Her Brown University research advisor was John N. Fain of the Division of Medical Sciences.

The research conducted by Margaret while she was a student at Brown University was "... among the first studies in signal transduction to point out that there are rapid effects of ligands that did not involve RNA or protein synthesis and occur by some intracellular messenger other than cyclic AMP." according to Fain. Other articles and book were published later in her career.[6] She also taught science and mathematics at the Opportunities Industrialization Center in Providence, Rhode Island, while completing her graduate studies.

After earning her doctorate degree, she served as a faculty member and researcher at Tuskegee University, Florida A&M University, and for a short period at Brown University. For several months after her tenure at Florida A&M University, she conducted research at the International Institute of Cellular and Molecular Pathology (ICP) in Brussels, Belgium. This tenure was made possible by a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Among the other institutions at which she has conducted research are the following: The Carver Research Foundation of Tuskegee University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Biomedical Institute, Summer 1974), University of Texas Medical School at Houston (Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy; Department of Pharmacology; Summer 1977), the NARACOM/ARIEM (Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine) in Natick, MA (between 1980 and 1985), and ICP in Brussels, Belgium (five months in 1978 1979).