Margaret Witherspoon, a member of the Honors Advisory Council since 2018, is a Senior Research Investigator and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research involves improving the quality and accuracy of diagnostic imaging with positron emission tomography.

Margaret is a graduate of Swarthmore College (’78) with a B.A. in Physics. She earned her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1983. Following graduation, she worked in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania until 1986. She then spent almost 13 years in the Departments of Nuclear Medicine and Positron Emission Tomography at the National Institutes of Health before going back to the University of Pennsylvania in 1998.

Margaret and her husband, Doug, are the parents of two JMU graduates: Laura, who graduated in 2012 with a B.A. in Modern Foreign Languages (French, Russian), and Catherine, who graduated in 2017 with a B.S. in Physics and a double major in French and who was among the first graduates from the JMU Honors College.