Women's History Month: The Life and Legacy of Angela Brodie
March 28, 2018
Westminster Hall
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our celebration of Women’s History Month. This year, we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Angela Brodie, who passed away last year after a career marked by discoveries that would fundamentally change the way we treat breast cancer and that would ultimately save the lives of hundreds of thousands of women around the world.
We’re enormously fortunate to be joined this afternoon by Dr. Harry Brodie, a renowned scientist who was partner to Angela in her work and—for 52 loving years—in marriage. We’re also honored to be joined by five accomplished women who knew Dr. Angela Brodie, who worked with her, who were inspired by her.
But today we’ll talk not only about what Dr. Brodie meant to the scientific community. We’ll also talk about how she helped shatter the glass ceiling in science; how she led in the lab, when there were so few women like her; how she insisted that her work be free to stand on its own merits; how she made it her mission to ensure that more women are recruited and supported in science.
We’ll talk about the hard work we must still undertake to ensure that women in research have the same opportunities as men. Because academic science isn’t immune to the Me Too movement or the Times Up movement. Far from it. They simply remind us that we have so much more to do, that the fight to keep workplaces free from harassment and discrimination isn’t over, that we must level our attention on eliminating the entrenched systems and structures that—to this day—inhibit wage equity for women and gender parity in positions of leadership. In these conversations, too, we owe a great debt to Dr. Brodie.
To get our important conversation going today, I’m honored to introduce a close colleague and friend of Dr. Brodie. Dr. Margaret McCarthy is chair of the Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine. Named UMB’s Researcher of the Year in 2015, Dr. McCarthy has collected a host of accolades for her work, including a selection in 2009 as one of Maryland’s Top 100 Women.
Dr. McCarthy’s research focuses on exploring the cellular mechanisms establishing sex differences in the brain. She combines a behavioral approach and a mechanistic approach in the laboratory to understand both normal brain development and how these processes might go selectively awry in males versus females.
Dr. McCarthy is president of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences and is associate editor of the journal Hormones and Behavior. She sits on the advisory board of eNeuro and on the Board of Scientific Councilors at the National Institute of Mental Health.
Dr. McCarthy received her PhD from Rutgers University, completed postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University, and was a National Research Council Fellow at the National Institutes of Health before joining our School of Medicine in 1993.
Please welcome Dr. Margaret McCarthy.
