Professor Margaret Hollyday, 1947-2006
In All Its Aspects, a Life Well Lived

As the academic year begins, the Bryn Mawr community struggles with the loss of a much-loved faculty member: Professor of Biology and Psychology Margaret Anne Hollyday, who died this summer after a hard-fought battle with cancer. Admired by students and colleagues for her generosity of spirit as well as her genius for experimental design and her deep commitment to scientific integrity, she was for many Bryn Mawr students a model of a woman's ability to succeed as both a scientist and a parent.

“Peggy was a dear friend and a valuable mentor,” said Associate Professor of Biology Tamara Davis. “She will be profoundly missed.”

Born in New Jersey on June 23, 1947, Hollyday graduated from Swarthmore College in 1969 and earned her Ph.D. at Duke University in 1974. After postdoctoral research at Washington University in St. Louis, she joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where she met Paul Grobstein, now a professor of biology at Bryn Mawr. Having already published several papers that were generally acknowledged as major contributions to the field of developmental neurobiology, Hollyday early in her career “had already established an unshakeable reputation for absolute integrity, for collecting and presenting observations in impeccably clear and unchallengeable ways,” Grobstein said. The two collaborated on several papers and ultimately married; their twins Jed and Rachel were born in 1984. Hollyday and Grobstein both came to Bryn Mawr as full professors in 1987.

“Peggy had an unusual ability to find in others things that she could value and trust, and then make people feel valued and trusted for those things,” says Grobstein. She quickly earned the esteem of the Bryn Mawr community.

Maya Ajmera '89, the founder and president of the Global Fund for Children, was one of the first Bryn Mawr students to serve as a research assistant in Hollyday's lab. “Peggy invested in people – in their talents and their vision,” Ajmera said. “She wasn't one of those scientists who think that time spent on students who don't pursue careers in science is wasted. She knew that what she valued in science – creativity, the generation of knowledge, enjoying the work, giving curiosity free rein – would take her students far in any field.”

Francesca Mariani '91 did pursue a career in science, earning a Ph.D. in biology at the University of California at Berkeley; she credits Hollyday with fostering her interest in the discipline. “She brought the topic to the classroom through experiments,” Mariani said. “She always presented information through the precise experiment that illustrated the principle -- not just classical experiments, but often ones that had just been published. She presented science as it was being done, and that made her lectures exciting to hear.” Students benefited from Hollyday's rigorous approach to experimental design, Mariani says: “She taught us to be critical, to ask whether experiments really demonstrated the hypotheses they claimed to prove, and to think of ways they might have been improved.”

“Her enthusiasm and dedication rubbed off on everyone who came into contact with her,” said Sujatha Narayan, Ph.D. '01. She remembers: “She saw me at the lab late one night when I was working on my dissertation research. She said, ‘You're here late, and you don't look happy.' I described a technical problem I was having, and she made an ingenious suggestion that helped me solve it. I wasn't doing my work in her lab, so she didn't have anything obvious to gain by helping me. I think this speaks not only to her generosity, but also to her dedication to science. She was always interested in figuring out the details and making improvements.”

Assistant Professor of Biology Neal Williams observed the same unfailing generosity and passionate commitment to research. “For a course I teach in experimental design and statistics, I was looking for data sets for my students to work with, and Peggy offered hers. Even though her research area is very different from mine, it was a pleasure to talk with her about her data, because her excitement about the work was so obvious and because her data was so scrupulously gathered. And she made herself available to my students. Talking to her about the process that generated the statistics really made the numbers come alive for them.”

Hollyday's recent research, funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, sought to determine what chemical cues triggered cell differentiation in the developing spinal cords of chick embryos and why motor neurons begin to differentiate earlier than interneurons. She was, colleagues say, determined to persist in her research and teaching despite her diagnosis of cancer; when illness forced her to take a final medical leave in April, she took a microscope home with her so that she could continue to advise her students.

An active member of the Main Line Unitarian Church, Hollyday was also an avid music lover who sang with the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Chorale. Colleagues and students remember her as an open-hearted friend, a devoted mother and a wise counselor who achieved a remarkable balance of the professional and personal. “All aspects of a life must be lived at once,” she told one student.

She is survived by her children Rachel and Jed Grobstein and their father, Paul Grobstein; her brothers, Bill and John; and her mother, Helen. A memorial service for Hollyday will be held at Bryn Mawr this fall.

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