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About the Authors:
Lucie Henein
Affiliation: Biomedical Research Institute, Rockville, Maryland, United States of America
James J. Cody
Affiliation: Biomedical Research Institute, Rockville, Maryland, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2790-1760
Michael H. Hsieh
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliations Biomedical Research Institute, Rockville, Maryland, United States of America, Division of Urology, Children’s National Health System, Washington, D.C., United States of America, Department of Urology, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., United States of AmericaCitation: Henein L, Cody JJ, Hsieh MH (2017) An enduring legacy of discovery: Margaret Stirewalt. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 11(8): e0005714. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0005714
Editor: Malcolm Jones, University of Queensland, AUSTRALIA
Published: August 17, 2017
Copyright: © 2017 Henein et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: This work was supported by National Institutes of Health - National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases grant R56AI119168 (MH, principal investigator), https://www.niaid.nih.gov/; Stirewalt Endowed Directorship (MH), Biomedical Research Institute, www.afbr-bri.com. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Margaret A. Stirewalt, PhD (married Lincicome), known as “Peg” to friends and family, was a brilliant female scientist dedicated to the study of tropical medicine. Her seminal research centered on the study of schistosomiasis.
Dr. Stirewalt was born on 18 January 1911 in Hickory, North Carolina. She was the eldest of 4 children and her father was a farmer turned banker. She later moved to New Market, Virginia, where her grandfather was a Lutheran minister. These influences molded Dr. Stirewalt's spiritual faith and passion for science, education, and nature.
Dr. Stirewalt received her BA in 1931 at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She continued her studies, earning an MA at Columbia University, New York, in 1935 before going on to obtain a doctorate degree in 1938 from the University of Virginia. It is important to note that in the 1930s, it was still rare to find women who had achieved this level of education, particularly in the sciences. The fact that Dr. Stirewalt earned her PhD in...