Margaret Becklake
Margaret Rigsby Becklake, was a Canadian academic and epidemiologist. Margaret focused her career on the study of environmental and occupational determinants of childhood and adult airway disease, specifically the lung health of asbestos miners and millers.
Born in London, England, Becklake grew up in Pretoria, South Africa and received an MB and BCh degree in 1944 from the University of the Witwatersrand. She interned at the Johannesburg General Hospital and did postgraduate studies at the British Postgraduate Medical School. In 1950, she became a Junior Lecturer in Medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand where she studied the effects of dust inhalation on workers in the gold mines. In 1957, she emigrated to Montreal, Quebec where she worked in the Department of Medicine at the Royal Victoria Hospital; she received an academic appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and Health at McGill University, where she is now an Emeritus Professor.
In 2007, she was made a Member of the Order of Canada in recognition for having made "outstanding contributions to fighting lung disease through research and education for more than 60 years". In 2011, she was made a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec.
She died at home on October 17, 2018.
The Montreal Chest Institute Foundation started the Dr. Margaret Becklake Fellowship to honour her memory. The Fellowship will be pay a salary to trainees in respiratory research who come from a low or middle-income countries and Canadian Indigenous communities.
