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Margaret Allen (born 1948) is an American cardiothoracic surgeon and an academic at the Benaroya Research Institute. She was the first woman to perform a heart transplant and is a former president of the United Network for Organ Sharing.
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Early life
Allen was raised in Des Moines, Iowa, where she became interested in science at a young age. After high school, she completed an undergraduate degree in zoology at Swarthmore College. She originally planned to study physiology in graduate school but thought that a medical degree would provide her with more career options. In 1970, she enrolled at the University of California San Diego to study a Doctor of Medicine.
Career
After graduating from medical school, Allen completed a five-year residency in general surgery at Oakland Medical Center (then the Kaiser Foundation Hospital) and a two-year residency in cardiothoracic surgery at King's College Hospital in London. After spending six months working in a Papua New Guinea hospital, she returned to the U.S. to undertake another residency in cardiac surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine in 1982. At Stanford, she trained under the tutelage of Norman Shumway, a pioneer in heart transplantation, and became the first woman in the world to transplant a heart.
At the end of her residency in 1985, Allen joined the surgical faculty of the University of Washington. She founded the University of Washington Medical Center's heart transplant, which was the first of its kind in the Pacific Northwest region, and was the program director until 1996. She was awarded "Woman of the Year" by the International Women's Forum in 1990 and was named one of the "Best Doctors in America" for five consecutive years beginning in 1992. In 1994 she was elected national president of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the first woman to hold the position.. As the president, she conducted an organ allocation analysis, reduced the time waiting for transplants, and increased awareness of organ donation in minority communities. In 1995, she shared the computerized technology of matching donated organs for transplant patients in Smithsonian Institution Computerworld Award in Medicine. Allen was appointed professor in the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of Washington in 1998. In 2000, however, she settled a sex-discrimination suit with the university; she received US$750,000 but was forced to resign from the cardiac transplant program and cease all of her research that has any tie to the University of Washington. She was the medical director of the Hope Heart Institute, a public health charity, where she was involved in several programs to promote heart disease prevention. In 2004, the institute merged with the Benaroya Research Institute, where she became a member of the Hope Heart Matrix Biology Program.