Margaret MacVicar
Margaret L.A. MacVicar was an American physicist and educator. In addition to serving as MIT's Dean of Undergraduate Education, MacVicar is credited with founding the now widely emulated Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program in 1969. MacVicar received her undergraduate and graduate degrees at MIT and joined the faculty, giving her the rare distinction of being a "MIT lifer."
Background
MacVicar was born on November 20, 1943, in Hamilton, Ontario to George and Elizabeth MacVicar. Her family relocated to Flint, Michigan in 1946 where she lived until she graduated from high school in 1961. Because she had been taking classes at a local junior college as a high school student, a local retired General Motors senior executive offered to help defray the costs of attending MIT.At MIT, she was one of the first residents of the McCormick Hall women's dormitory, which opened in the fall of 1963. She was the president of the Association of Women students, and also served as a physics tutor at McCormick Hall; Shirley Ann Jackson was one of the students she tutored. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1964 and a doctor of science degree in metallurgy and materials science in 1967. Between 1967 and 1969, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Royal Society Mond section of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. In 1969, she joined the department of physics at MIT, where her research investigated high-temperature metal and ceramic superconductors, single crystal and thin-film materials research, and detecting corrosion kinetics using superconducting magnetometry.
As dean for undergraduate education, she worked to recruit more women, minorities, and students of varied interests, implemented changes in the humanities and social science requirements, and publicly criticized a Department of Defense policy barring homosexuals from ROTC programs.
MacVicar was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science from Clarkson University in 1985. She was Orator at the 1984 Literary Exercises of Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard University; Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Texas in 1979; and Vollmer W. Fries Lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1976. She was a member of the corporations of the Charles S. Draper Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a trustee of Radcliffe College and of the Boston Museum of Science, and a director of Exxon Corporation, the Harvard/MIT Cooperative Society and H. W. Brady Company. She was a fellow of the American Physical Society. In 1986, MacVicar was awarded the Valeria A. Knapp Award by The College Club of Boston in memory of the teacher and director of The Winsor School, a girls' college prep school, from 1951 to 1963.
She died on September 30, 1991, at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, a year after being diagnosed with cancer.