Susan decided to turn her hand to creative writing after a long career in medical research, public health advocacy and the pharmaceutical industry. She holds Master’s degrees in pharmacy and biostatistics, a PhD in epidemiology and health economics, and was a National Health and Medical Research Council Neil Hamilton Fairley Fellow. She holds honorary professorships at Griffith University and the University of Melbourne.

Many of Susan’s research projects have influenced health policy. For example, her early work on the use of theophylline in acute asthma highlighted its toxicity and led to an appropriate decline in its use. The ecological analysis of the effectiveness of needle-exchanges that she published in The Lancet, was pivotal in securing government support for these programs.

Her major area of expertise is cost-effectiveness analysis and she has written numerous successful submissions, on behalf of not-for-profits and pharmaceutical companies, for government subsidy of medicines. Susan’s experience in the medical research and biotechnology words was invaluable in the writing of Eight Lives, her first novel. Susan is a keen traveller and aspiring sketcher. She lives in Melbourne with her husband and labradoodle:

She discusses:

• Her career & business background and able to touch on some of the research projects that have influenced health policy.
• Fiction that educates as well as informs. She likes to read fiction that’s ‘about something’ in addition to the characters and the story, fiction that takes me to a world I don’t know or relates to a subject I’m unfamiliar with. The seed of the idea for the book came from a UK drug trial.
• Ignorance about science is pervasive. In Australia, every second person believes that psychic powers are real, and one in five believes in magic. Although this could be viewed as harmless, or even amusing, the so-called ‘anti-vaxers’ provide a pertinent example of the human cost of such ignorance. Fiction like Eight Lives has the potential to educate people about science, and this learning, occurring while the reader’s emotions are heightened — when they are feeling empathy for the characters of a novel, say — has the potential to be sustained.