Founding and developing Core Kids, MGRRE’s K-12 Outreach Program, has allowed Susan to combine her two previous professional careers, biomedical research and science writing, with her passion for exciting kids about science.  An elementary education major upon entering college in 1976, Susan took one class in Biology and then was hooked on “doing” science, spending the next 18 years researching the immune response to infections, cancers, and our own body tissues, first at the University of South Florida School of Medicine, then at the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver, the University of Miami School of Medicine and Baxter Diagnostics, in Miami, FL.

In 1996, with two-year-old twins at home, she retired from research and began a part-time career as a freelance science writer, writing for organizations such as American Chemical Society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Novartis Pharmaceuticals and MD Anderson Cancer Center.  Once her twins, now 13, started school in 1999, she began spending most of her days helping out in elementary school classrooms and doing her writing at night.  She quickly realized that with her science and communications backgrounds she could help classroom teachers to overcome one of the hurdles they face when teaching science in the classroom – she could help the kids to realize that what their teachers were offering them was a wonderful way of looking at the world – not a difficult school subject.  She began visiting as many classrooms as possible to show students how relevant science is to their lives and how exciting it can be to be doing science.

For many years her husband, a geologist, had harped on her about being a life scientist.  “Life exists because geology allows it to,” he would quote a famous scientist. With his influence, she found herself visiting classrooms to talk about earthquakes and coastal erosion even more often than she talked about genetics.  Finally she was converted and in 2006 joined the team at MGRRE to initiate a K-12 Outreach Program!  Geology and biology can never be separated however, so always expect to hear something about one when she comes to talk to you about the other!

Although new, professionally, to both geosciences and education, Susan is pleased to be surrounded by both geoscientists and educators who are helping her to develop MGRRE’s resources into educational tools that can spread an earth science literacy message to students and teachers in Michigan.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

--T.S. Elliott