Growing up in Newton
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Susan’s family moved to Newton for its terrific schools as so many others did. She attended the Ward School, Weeks and Newton High School . She began working summers at the age of 15 at the Waltham Hospital thinking that would be a good time to learn about becoming a doctor as both her mother and father were physicians.
She majored in psychology at Tufts University where she had many volunteer gigs as part of the Leonard Carmichael Society. When it came time to apply to medical school instead Susan applied to graduate schools in Urban Planning and attended New York University School of Public Administration |
Professional planner
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Her first planning job was in a small organization called the Bureau of Retardation in the Office of Planning and Program Coordination in the Office of Administration and Finance for the Commonwealth. This was an exciting time because the deinstitutionalization movement was just beginning and community group homes were being established for mentally retarded people. Susan specialized in this area and worked with the first group homes in the Commonwealth as they began to provide community placements and services. Soon Title XIX funds could support community-based group homes for developmentally disabled people and Susan wrote the plan for the deinstitutionalization of the six state schools as her last task for the Bureau.
Susan became the Associate Director of the Division of Mental Retardation in the Department of Mental Health and worked to support programs and services during this exiting time in the growth of community-based services for mentally retarded people. |
Getting Involved in Newton
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Susan married John Albright – a southerner from Tennessee and had two sons David and James. It was during her sons' early years that Susan became involved with community service in Newton.
 Susan and her Cabot PTO co-president celebrated Cabot's 60th birthday with Humpty Dumpty
When her oldest son was in Kindergarten at the Cabot School she joined the newly formed Class Size Committee. Suddenly, the baby boom echo was recognized to be causing an upward trend in school age children in Newton contrary to what the School Department thought at the time. After holding a number of volunteer positions at Cabot, Susan became the Cabot PTO Co-President and was successful in getting the first modular classrooms at Cabot to meet the growing number of school age children. Later Susan became an officer in the PTO council and continued to advocate for Newton’s schools. This led to eight years on the School Committee where she served as Vice Chair and Chair.
After years of volunteering for Newton, Susan added a paid job at Tufts University School of Medicine which had just received a grant from the National Library of Medicine. She developed a plan to use technology to enhance the academic, research, clinical and administrative functions of an Academic Health Center. That plan led to a new career in Information technology. Susan created what became known as TUSK, the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase, an enterprise educational system. Susan directs a staff of 10 and in 2012 OpenTUSK was posted to GIT hub as open source software. She has traveled to India, Africa and Saudi Arabia to help health sciences schools use the system and enhance health sciences education throughout the world.
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,At Tufts she won several awards. In 2008 Tufts University Susan was nominated and awarded the Change Agent Award at University’s first Distinction Awards Ceremony, The award said she “has helped transform the delivery of the curriculum and educational resources in the health sciences at Tufts and around the world.” . In 2012 she won the Implementers award from Medbiquitous, an organization based at Johns Hopkins University, to advance the health professions through technology standards for her work to implement the Curriculum Inventory specification for exchanging and compiling data about health professions curriculum. Recently Susan started a company, M:ed:Integrate -helping health sciences schools globally to use technology to improve medical education.
During her eight years on the School Committee class size, classroom space and building upgrades were constant themes as the school aged population in Newton continued to grow. Just as her time on the Committee was coming to a close the decision was made to build a new Newton North High School. Susan felt committed to seeing that school through to completion and to address all the deteriorating buildings in Newton and so ran for the Board of Aldermen (now the City Council) where she is completing her seventh term.