Margaret Hostetter

Department: Pediatrics

Years active at Yale: 1998-2010

Dr. Hostetter is recognized for going where few women had gone before: leadership posts in pediatrics departments at leading universities. She joined the Yale faculty as a professor of pediatrics and director of the Yale Child Health Research Center. In 2002 she was named the Jean McLean Wallace Professor and chair of the department of pediatrics. At the time, there were no other women chairs at the Yale School of Medicine—and very few across the country.

Between 2000 and 2010, Dr. Hostetter was also professor of microbial pathogenesis. She is one of only three women to be elected president of the Society for Pediatric Research and the American Pediatric Society over the past 125 years. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and the Association of American Physicians (AAP). It is rare for pediatricians to be elected to both the ASCI and the AAP. Her research has also won research honors including the E. Mead Johnson Award, the Samuel Rosenthal Award, and the Maxwell Finland Lecture in Infectious Diseases.

In 2010, Dr. Hostetter left Yale to become chief medical officer and director of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. True to form, she was the first woman to hold those posts.