Obituaries

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Feb. 11 in Westminster Presbyterian Church for Margaret MacGillivray, a pediatric endocrinologist and longtime UB faculty member who died Sept. 17 from Alzheimer’s disease. She was 86.

Born Margaret Hilda Stoute in Trinidad, MacGillivray immigrated to Canada at the age of 10 after the death of her mother, and she and her four siblings were raised there by her father and stepmother.

She attended medical school at the University of Toronto and later moved to Los Angeles, where she was chief resident at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and a research fellow in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology.

In 1957 she married mathematician Dean MacGillivray. They spent three years in Boston, during which she was a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital Children’s Service, and then relocated to Buffalo in 1964, where they both joined the UB faculty. Margaret MacGillivray became a staff member at Children’s Hospital in 1969 and was named director of the hospital’s Division of Endocrinology in 1992.

A professor in the Department of Pediatrics, MacGillivray’s seminal study on growth hormone secretion in 1967 established her as a pioneer in her field. She was the author or co-author of more than 100 published articles and more than 20 published chapters, and presented more than 100 abstracts at various endocrine meetings.

Among numerous professional appointments, she was a medical adviser for the Food and Drug Administration, and served as the president of the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society in 1995.

MacGillivray also was considered an outstanding mentor to her students and in 1977 received the Louis and Ruth Siegel Award for Excellence in Teaching from the UB medical school.

She retired from UB in 2001. Her husband, a member of the UB mathematics faculty for 37 years, died in 2001.