Margaret Elizabeth Barr-Bigelow


Margaret Elizabeth Barr-Bigelow was a Canadian mycologist known for her contributions to the Ascomycetes fungi.

Biography

Margaret Barr was born on April 16, 1923 in the small town of Elkhorn in the Canadian province of Manitoba. She studied at the University of British Columbia receiving her bachelor's degree in 1950 and her Master's in 1952. In 1956, Barr married mycologist Howard E. Bigelow and was awarded a Ph.D. for her work The taxonomic position of the genus Mycosphaerella as shown by comparative developmental studies one week later. After getting married, Barr and her husband worked for some time in the University of Montreal and from 1957 to 1987 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. During her career she was the editor-in-chief of Mycologia from 1976 to 1980, was general chairman of the AIBS conference in Amherst in 1986 and received a Faculty Fellowship Award to research Pyrenomycetes. Two years after the death of Howard in 1987, Barr moved to the city of Sidney in British Columbia where she died on April 1, 2008. In her lifetime, she published more than 150 scientific publications on various Ascomycetes, with the last one described in 2007.

Genera and species of fungi, named after M.E. Barr