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Meet Our Chair

Margaret Kendrick Hostetter, M.D.

The eldest of five children born to Jack and Margaret Kendrick in Toledo, Ohio, Dr. Hostetter graduated summa cum laude in English from Denison University, where she was a National Merit Scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She obtained her medical degree magna cum laude from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha. In addition to medical school awards in pediatrics, surgery, and psychiatry, she won the American Medical Women's Association Award for graduating first in her class.

Margaret K. Hostetter, MD

Dr. Hostetter completed her pediatric residency and fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at Children's Hospital Boston, where she was named the Charles A. Janeway Outstanding Fellow in Pediatrics in 1978. After two years as an instructor at Children's Hospital, Dr. Hostetter and her family moved to the University of Minnesota in 1982. Over the next 16 years, she became Professor and chief, Division of Infectious Diseases ('92-'98). For six years she occupied the American Legion Heart Research Chair in Pediatrics formerly held by Lewis Thomas, Robert Good, and Paul Quie. Recruited to Yale as professor in 1998, she was appointed Chair, Department of Pediatrics, and Physician-in-Chief of the Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital in September of 2002. She was named the Jean McLean Wallace Professor in 2004.

She is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and has been listed in Best Doctors in America since 1996. She is the mother of Mayme, a National Merit Scholar (Harvard '01), who teaches eighth grade English at KIPP Academy in New York City, and Jack (Washington University '03), a member of the New York City Police Academy.

She has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1982 for her studies of virulence factors in Streptococcus pneumoniae and Candida species. S. pneumoniae is the leading cause of death due to respiratory infections in children around the world, and Dr. Hostetter's group has contributed to the development of safe and inexpensive protein-based vaccines that address this disease. Dr. Hostetter's studies with Candida albicans have focused on the factors that increase risk of bloodstream infections in premature newborns and other immunocompromised hosts. She and members of her laboratory hold five patents for these discoveries.

Her clinical research, initiated with colleagues Dana Johnson, Kay Dole, and Sandra Iverson at the University of Minnesota, focuses on the medical and developmental evaluation of internationally adopted children; some of her prospective studies in the 1980's and 1990's helped to establish formal standards for post-adoption medical surveillance in this special pediatric population. At Yale she has worked with Michael Cappello and Carol Weitzman to establish the Yale International Adoption Clinic, which Drs. Cappello and Weitzman now direct.

Her research contributions have been acknowledged by receipt of the Maxwell Finland Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Academy of Pediatrics Award for Excellence in Research, the Samuel Rosenthal Award for outstanding contributions to academic pediatrics, and the E. Mead Johnson Award for Pediatric Research from the Society for Pediatric Research, where she was the first woman elected to the presidency in 20 years. For the past 10 years, she has been program director for the Pediatric Scientist Development Program, the largest training grant in the NIH portfolio. In addition to the IOM, she is a member of the Society for Pediatric Research, the American Pediatric Society, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the Association of American Physicians.