LAUSR

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 a scientific field is laudable, but she did not stop there. After receiving her PhD, Dr. Stirewalt joined the United States Navy during World War II, serving as an intelligence officer and commander. She then became a Naval Medical Officer at the Naval Medical Research Institute (NMRI) in Bethesda, Maryland. The 1940s were a challenging time for women to be successful scientists—or military officers, for that matter. With her strong-willed nature and intelligence, Dr. Stirewalt overcame these challenges and initiated a schistosomiasis research program. She authored over 50 peer-reviewed primary research papers, several of which have been cited more than 170 times. Her work on schistosome cercariae, the parasite stage that invades its definitive mammalian host, has been a particularly important contribution to the field of parasitology. She was one of the first scientists to clearly outline the process whereby these cercariae invade, through the use of remarkably detailed electron micrographs that illustrated these mechanisms (Fig 1). Dr. Stirewalt maintained an active research program and published research articles regularly from the 1940s through the 1980s, with her last publication being a review article in 2002. Her initial work focused on infection of mammalian hosts by cercariae, including an early study on prevention of infection [2]. She was among the first to characterize the process of infection by cercariae and published a key study on skin penetration in five different hosts, including humans [3]. She also published a series of studies examining the serological responses to infection in multiple mammalian hosts [4–8]. As she continued her focus on cercariae, she was among the earliest to describe in detail the acetabular gland complex in Schistosoma mansoni and laid the groundwork for characterizing the secretory products of this complex [9]. Through the 1960s, she published numerous articles on the effects of various experimental