Margaret Mae Hermánek Peaslee - SVU Vice President

Her four grandparents were born in Bohemia, from towns in the vicinity of Plzen. The grandparents all settled in Chicago, where both her parents were born. Her paternal grandparents had passed on before she was born, but she developed an appreciation for the Czech language from her maternal grandmother, who taught her Czech songs. Her father entered the dry goods business and eventually owned his own general merchandise stores in Chicago suburbs. Her mother worked with him in the business.

She was born in Chicago and attended elementary school in the Chicago suburbs. She finished junior high, high school, and undergraduate college in Florida, earning a B.S. in biology from Florida Southern College. She met her future husband at Florida Southern, and they spent the first nine years of their married life back in the Chicago area. Their daughter was born in Chicago and Margaret began her graduate work when the daughter was three years of age. She completed M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at Northwestern University. Her first faculty position was in the Biology Department at Florida Southern College. After two years the family moved to Vermillion, South Dakota, where she spent eight years on the faculty of the Biology Department at the University of South Dakota. They moved to Ruston, Louisiana, when Margaret was offered a position as Head of the Department of Zoology at Louisiana Tech University. After seventeen years there, having moved into the position of Associate Dean of the College of Life Sciences, the family relocated to Titusville, Pennsylvania, where Margaret assumed the position of Vice President for Academic Affairs for the University of Pittsburgh at Titusville. She is in her eleventh year in this position. Her husband has been very supportive of her career moves throughout their married life.

The major focus of her past research activity has been endocrinology and pigment cells, and she has more than 25 published papers in this area. As a biologist she had an interest in Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics. When she began to trace her roots in 1991, she visited the Augustinian Monastery and Mendel Museum in Brno. She is now working in the history of science with special emphasis on F.M. Kláácel. She has had the good fortune of developing a professional relationship with Professor Víítezslav Orel, Mendel historian and Emeritus Head of the Mendel Museum. One of their joint publications is F. M. (Ladimíír) Kláácel: Teacher of Gregor Mendel, Kosmas 15(1):31-54, Fall 2001.