Magazine: Spring 2026

Faculty: Maggie’s Way

Because it’s only right

By Michele Dula Baum

As in any organization, there are people at the University of Pittsburgh whom everyone knows and people who know everyone. Margaret C. “Maggie” McDonald, PhD, MFA, who retired in February 2026, is one of those people about whom both are true.

McDonald’s road to Pittsburgh began early in 1980s when she met Thomas Detre, MD, visionary psychiatrist and academician credited with transforming the University’s teaching hospitals into what is now the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and its six schools of the health sciences into a powerhouse of biomedical and scientific research. Detre, then president of Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, invited her to join the staff as a communications and development specialist, a position she accepted in 1983.

A native of Budapest who had escaped Hungary during the Holocaust, Detre had clear expectations. “He told you what he wanted done and when he wanted it, and then left you to get it done,” McDonald says. “I’ll never forget the day he called me into his office and said we needed to write a letter to George Taber at the Richard King Mellon Foundation and I responded, ‘What do you want us to say?’ in my faux Hungarian, and he said, ‘Say that again and I will correct your accent.’”

Part of the Uralic family of languages, Hungarian is related more to Finnish than to any of the languages like French, German or Italian that are typically taught in American schools. Hats off to any native English speaker who tries to say “Mit szeretnél, hogy mondjunk?” to someone from Budapest—let alone someone from Budapest who is their boss.

Detre had secured a commitment from the foundation for funding to establish a cancer institute (now the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center) and tasked McDonald with writing the project proposal. “It was something like three pages for $1 million each and he said, ‘I need it by the end of the day.’”

McDonald delivered.

It’s something she’s done in her own considered, thoughtful, and meticulous way throughout the following 40-plus years as a top health sciences administrator and in her University faculty appointments in the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (associate professor of clinical and translational science), the School of Public Health (associate professor of epidemiology), School of Medicine (associate professor of psychiatry), and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences (affiliate faculty, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies).

Anyone who’s worked with McDonald will tell you there is the way it was done before and there’s Maggie’s way. (There is a reason her profile is the only piece of writing in this magazine to employ the Oxford comma structure.)

“She used to wear a bracelet with the name of her sailboat on it—Integrity,” says Lisa Lorence, McDonald’s right-hand since 1996 at UPMC and through to this year in the Office of Academic and Global Affairs, Health Sciences. “I think that sums up her career and leadership. I’ve learned so much from Maggie.”
Another good word is perseverance.

After nearly a decade of part-time study while working full-time, McDonald earned a doctorate in epidemiology at what was then the Graduate School of Public Health in 1993. She had arrived in Pittsburgh armed with a bachelor's degree in English and drama from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and a Master of Fine Arts from Antioch University in Columbia, MD. Her early career involved work as a writer, editor, and consultant, often for the American Psychiatric Association—an annual conference of which figured as the location of her pivotal meeting with Detre.

“I thought I would finish my degree and go back to D.C.,” says McDonald, whose duties shifted under the administration of Arthur S. Levine, MD, senior vice chancellor for the health sciences from 1998 to 2020. With Levine, McDonald managed a formidable workload that encompassed event planning, grants administration, international collaborations, and internal and external communications.

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"Maggie is a force of nature whose passion for global health has shaped not just policies and programs, but lives across continents."

Mary Hawk, DrPH
Professor and Chair, Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences

For 20 years, McDonald organized and managed a yearly science conference that highlighted research being conducted by faculty at Pitt and in collaboration with neighboring Carnegie Mellon University. The conference drew hundreds of participants for three days of lectures and poster presentations by University students in the health sciences, Swanson School of Engineering and Dietrich School’s Departments of Biological Sciences, Chemistry, and Neuroscience.

“Maggie and I met shortly after she moved to Pittsburgh and over the years, she went on to work on a vast variety of projects across the institution,” says psychiatrist Mary Ganguli, MD, MPH, who is also professor of epidemiology and neurology. “However, it is on writing that she and I did the most work (and had the most fun) together. Maggie remains the go-to expert whom I consult on thorny questions of grammar and syntax.”

Public Health also reaped the benefits of McDonald’s expertise when she, Ganguli and former epidemiology chair Roberta Ness MD, MPH, developed and taught a “writing epidemiology” course that focused on developing grant applications and journal articles.

McDonald’s detailed focus is perhaps most evident among Pitt’s international ventures, including partnerships established in 2012 with Tsinghua University and Xiangya School of Medicine, elite institutions in China that sent scholars to Pittsburgh for training biomedical research, and the Nazarbayev University School of Medicine (NUSOM) in central Asia’s Republic of Kazakhstan.

Nazarbayev University (NU) was created in 2010 by then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev, and McDonald was present at the new school’s birth. Pitt’s School of Medicine was engaged in 2012 to work with NU to create a new school of medicine from the ground up. That school, Nazarbayev University School of Medicine (NUSOM) was formally established in 2015 and is the academic hub of Kazakhstan’s first integrated academic health system offering a curriculum taught in English to educate future medical leaders in health care, education and biomedical research. McDonald was a prominent member of Pitt’s leadership team dealing directly with Kazakh officials and local stakeholders to build NUSOM.

“We helped them do everything—hire faculty, write bylaws, policies and procedures, and envision what a medical school should look like,” remembers McDonald, adding that a public health perspective was also front-and-center from the beginning.

Indeed, McDonald’s expertise was indispensable to the founding of NUSOM’s successful Master of Public Health program, says Byron Crape, PhD, MSPH, associate professor of practice at NUSOM, adding that she served on the program’s admissions committee for more than 10 years.

“Our 250 program alumni are having directly measurable, substantial impacts on the health of the population in Kazakhstan, with significant numbers also completing PhDs worldwide,” Crape continues. “Maggie is one of the foundational pillars in that success.”

How does one total such accomplishments?

Perhaps in a way a lifelong artist like McDonald would recognize: Brava.