Margaret E. M. Tolbert

"My experience as a woman in chemistry and management has been most positive. Although I have encountered some challenges, there were none that I could not overcome."

Margaret Tolbert has worked across the chemical map. As a chemistry professor at Tuskegee University, she explored the chemistry of the liver. She then became director of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee. Later recruited by industry, she developed corporate research and development strategies for British Petroleum.

From 1996 to 2002, Tolbert was director of the New Brunswick Laboratory, a government research facility for nuclear chemistry. Currently she is a senior spokesperson for the National Science Foundation, promoting its efforts to involve women, underrepresented minorities, and people with disabilities in scientific research and education.

About Her Life

Margaret Ellen Tolbert (born 1943) has had three careers: one in research, one in government, and one in educational outreach. With an education in chemistry, she has taken herself from humble beginnings to a working life that has covered a wide variety of activities and taken her around the world.

Tolbert was born in Suffolk, Virginia. Her parents separated when she was a child, and her mother died shortly thereafter. She was raised by her grandmother for a time and then by an older sister. As a young woman, Tolbert quickly figured out that education was her best chance to overcome these less-than-ideal circumstances. She worked hard at school and was an outstanding student. To help her family's strained finances, she worked after school as a housekeeper. This not only brought in extra money; it introduced her to a married couple, the Cooks, who would become very important in her life.

“Opportunities are available. Seek them out and take advantage of them. Set your goals. Map out a plan to accomplish those goals. Identify persons who can assist you along the way and ask them for their assistance. Seek advisement from successful persons. Don't get lost in ‘what if’ or ‘if I had.’ Get out there and work for what you want in a career. (From personal correspondence with Tolbert, 2003)

The Cooks became Tolbert’s close friends, and they encouraged her to go to college, as did her teachers. They even drove her all the way to Alabama to visit the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where they had friends on the faculty. Tolbert decided to enroll, first planning on medical school, but changing her plans when she learned that she could receive more financial aid as a chemistry student. As an undergraduate at Tuskegee, she got her first taste of research while investigating the electrical conductivity of electrolyte solutions. She also learned about George Washington Carver, the scientist who spent a career at Tuskegee studying peanuts and peanut products with the hope of creating markets for the impoverished farmers of southern Alabama. Carver became a personal hero to Tolbert.

After graduating in 1967 with her B.S. in chemistry, Tolbert earned an M.S. in analytical chemistry from Wayne State University in Michigan. She then returned to Tuskegee to work as a lab technician, also teaching math and courses for outreach programs for high school science teachers. But before long, she left Tuskegee for graduate school at Brown University in Rhode Island. There she studied biochemistry and researched the liver and how it works. For her doctoral work she looked at how the liver synthesizes glucose, a simple sugar, and how the body tells the liver when to start making glucose and when to stop. Liver chemistry would be an ongoing theme throughout her research career at other institutions.

After getting her Ph.D. in 1974, Tolbert worked at many institutions, from Florida A&M University, where she was a dean, to the International Institute of Cellular and Molecular Pathology. Since she loves travel, this lifestyle suited her well. She even returned to Tuskegee again for a time to head the Carver Research Foundation and serve in the university administration. She worked in industry, taking a sabbatical from Tuskegee to work for British Petroleum, which took her to Ohio and England. In addition, she spent time at Argonne National Laboratory and helped establish educational cooperation between large U.S. government labs and universities in West Africa.

In 1996 she entered government work as director of the New Brunswick Laboratory in Illinois, part of the U.S. Department of Energy. There she used her training in analytical chemistry in the efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons technology. She led her staff in efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear materials, prepare and certify nuclear reference materials for use in the standardization of instruments, evaluate the measurement capabilities of different nuclear laboratories worldwide, and measure the amount of nuclear material in samples from various sources throughout to world.

Throughout her career Tolbert had always been involved in educational outreach. In 2002 she decided to make outreach her full-time job, and she went to work at the National Science Foundation as a senior-level spokesperson, promoting the agency's efforts to increase participation of women, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities in science.