Pediatrics trailblazer
Margaret Leigh, M.D. (M.D. ’76), a pediatrician, educator and leading researcher of rare lung diseases, seemed predestined to become a doctor.
Her grandfather, Dr. Southgate Leigh, was a surgeon who founded Leigh Memorial Hospital in Norfolk in 1903. Her father, Dr. Southgate Leigh Jr., also was a surgeon.
Despite the family’s medical heritage, Dr. Leigh’s father initially discouraged her from pursuing medicine in the early ’70s because of the challenges women faced in the field at the time.
“Magee,” as Dr. Leigh is known among friends and colleagues, was undeterred.
“I pretty much wanted to go into medicine or science,” she recalls. “I liked to take care of people, listen to people, understand people.”
Dr. Leigh grew up in Norfolk, where she was a debutante. She skipped kindergarten and first grade, went to Sweet Briar College at 16 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1973. That September, she started at EVMS as a member of the first class.
“When I got into medical school, he was very happy,” Dr. Leigh says of her father, who loved to talk with her about her anatomy studies.
Dr. Leigh was one of two dozen people — and just four women — in her class. Being so small, the class was very close and supportive, she says.
That nurturing environment was crucial, especially following the sudden death of Dr. Leigh’s father from a ruptured aortic aneurysm at the end of her first year, a time that brought her closer to peers and faculty.
Throughout medical school, Dr. Leigh was drawn to pediatrics, though surgery was appealing. Ultimately, she chose pediatrics, a field she found more welcoming to women.
After an EVMS internship at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in Norfolk, she took a “period of reckoning” to reflect and figure out what she wanted to do.
She resumed her training with a residency at the University of Kentucky. There, her career began to take shape, leading her toward academic medicine and a focus on cystic fibrosis.
After a fellowship in the then-new field of pediatric pulmonology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she stayed there to care for children with chronic lung diseases; teach medical students, residents and pulmonary fellows; and research chronic lung diseases. For 20 years, she was director of UNC’s Cystic Fibrosis Center.
Dr. Leigh is an expert in primary ciliary dyskinesia, or PCD, a lung disease even rarer than cystic fibrosis. She is involved in research to improve and develop tools to help diagnose and evaluate patients with PCD. Her work has helped define the clinical characteristics of PCD and expanded the understanding of genetic complexities in such diseases.
She retired from clinical practice in 2023 but remains busy as a professor emeritus and as a member of the board of directors of the Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia Foundation. Her legacy continues through the Foundation’s Margaret W. Leigh Early Career Investigator Award to support emerging PhD and physician scientists researching PCD.
With her partner of more than 40 years, fellow physician Marsha Davenport, M.D., Dr. Leigh adopted and raised two children from Guatemala. In her free time, she loves to snorkel and travel to places like the Galapagos, where she can see interesting creatures.
Asked what she’d like to be known for in her career, Dr. Leigh says, laughing, “The word that most people would associate with me is ‘perseverance.’”
Another thing, she adds, is that she has good relationships with her patients.
“I think this is from EVMS. I very much appreciate the patients and their interactions. I learn from them.”
Dr. Leigh attended the 50th anniversary celebration for EVMS and found that the school “has really matured. It’s special.”
None of Dr. Leigh’s four siblings went into medicine, and neither did any family members in the following generation. She proudly notes, though, that one great-niece has started medical school while another great-niece has been accepted to medical school, ensuring the family heritage lives on.
Photo at top courtesy of UNC Health