Hooked on diving since the age of 16, Susan is a biologist, teacher, science writer, and life-long student of natural history. Her doctoral dissertation in 1978 was on the respiratory physiology of sabellid fanworms. She spent 11 years in the Environmental Physiology Department of the U.S. Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland where she performed research on the physiology of ultradeep diving, and was eventually the head of the decompression sickness research program. She is the patented inventor of biochemical decompression. Susan has also managed biomedical research programs for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).