Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 16, 1901. Both her parents were academicians. Mead studied at DePauew University before transfering to Barnard College. She earned her Master degree from Columbia in 1924. She became an assistant curator at the American Musuem of Natural History and received her Phd from Columbia in 1929.
Mead did her fieldwork in Samoa and New Guinea which led to Margaret Mead's achieving both an enduring reputation of one of the century's most important anthropologists and near-celebrity status.
While her methods were sometimes criticized, Mead's approach is considered to have revolutionized the field of cross-cultural analysis.