After completing her BSc Hons and PhD at the University of Sydney, Australia, Susan was a Human Frontiers in Science Long-Term Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Connecticut, USA. After gaining an academic position there, she returned to Australia in 2006 to teach and research at UQ. She completed a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education at UQ in 2007 and in 2009 she was appointed as a full-time teaching-focused faculty member in SCMB. She is now a Professor in the school.
Susan has been a Manning Clark Fellow, an American Society for Microbiology Biology Scholar, and a UQ Teaching Fellow. She has won multiple awards for her teaching, including a UQ Award for Teaching Excellence (2013), an Australian Award for University Teaching (2014) and the 2014 Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Beckman Coulter Award for Teaching Excellence. In 2018 she was awarded Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
From 2016-2017 she served as the Deputy Director of the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation (ITaLI) at UQ. In 2017 she was a UQ Fellow, working on the mapping and development of Work Integrated Learning opportunities for students in the Faculty of Science.
In 2018-202 she is seconded as Deputy Associate Dean Academic (Future Students and Employability) for the Faculty of Science at UQ.