Margaret Tolbert
Margaret Ellen Mayo Tolbert (born November 24, 1943 in Suffolk, Virginia) is a chemist and former director of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee University and of the U.S. Department of Energy's New Brunswick Laboratory.
Margaret is the daughter of Mr & Mrs Clifton Mayo of Suffolk, but was raised by her grandmother. After graduating as valedictorian of her high school, she enrolled at Tuskegee Institute as a pre-med major, then switched to chemistry because of available financial aid. She completed her bachelor of science in 1967 and then a master's in analytical chemistry at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan a year later. She returned to Tuskegee as a research technician and mathematics instructor in 1969 and was promoted to assistant professor of chemistry in 1973.
In 1974 she completed her PhD in biochemistry at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She spent another year there as an associate professor, and married her second husband, Henry Hudson Tolbert. She visited California as a research associate at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, then spent the next two years back at Tuskegee. In 1977 she divided her time between a visiting scientist post at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston and as associate dean of Florida A&M University's School of Pharmacy in Tallahassee.
In 1978 Tolbert traveled to Brussels, Belgium for a five-month research fellowship at the International Institute of Cellular & Molecular Pathology. She returned to Tuskegee as a full professor in 1980 and was appointed to direct the Carver Research Foundation. Over the next few years she visited research laboratories around the world as part of her duties.
Tolbert was one of three African Americans appointed to newly-created seats on the University of Alabama Board of Trustees in 1982. Those appointments were challenged by the Alabama State Senate Rules Committee under a new policy instituted by Bill Baxley. She resigned from the board, along with Robin Swift and Louis Willie Jr, in 1983.
Before leaving Tuskegee in 1988 she was also named an Associate Provost for Research & Development and served for three years as a director of the Birmingham Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. She spent a sabbatical year working with Standard Oil of Ohio, after which she focused on a career in science management.
Tolbert left Tuskegee in 1988 to work as a senior planner for BP America's Research Center in Warrensville Heights, Ohio. In 1990 she was made a program director for the National Science Foundation in Washington D.C. In 1994 she left for a three-month stint as Program Officer for International Programs at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, then was named Director of the Division of Educational Programs at the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois. In 1996 she was named director of the New Brunswick Laboratory, also in Argonne.
In 2001 Tolbert was promoted to acting associate director of the Department of Energy's Office of Laboratory Operations and Environment. From 2002 until her retirement in December 2011 she served as a senior adviser, program director and executive liaison for the National Science Foundation.
Tolbert is a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management.
References
- Wheat, Jack (July 12, 1983) "3 trustees quit; poisoned political climate charged" Tuscaloosa News
- Brown, Jeanette E., interviewer (August 13, 2009) "Margaret E. M. Tolbert" oral history interview. Chemical Heritage Foundation Center for Oral History.