Profile

As an instructional designer at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Susan is involved in the development and implementation of multimedia learning environments that supplement the traditional medical school curriculum. Her mission is to explore the design and use of visually rich digital media for communication and learning.

Susan’s early adult life is defined by hours spent studying Chinese and living in Asia. She majored in East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, graduating in 1981. During her junior year, as a participant in the Yale-in-China program, she spent a year immersed in Chinese culture and language at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The year was 1979, the moment in history when the United States and China re-established diplomatic relations, and Susan was able to enter the People’s Republic of China as part of a student delegation, witnessing a society as it emerged from self-imposed isolation after the Cultural Revolution, and before it was affected by outside cultural and economic influences. From 1982-1984 Susan lived in Taipei as a Chinese language student and taught English as Second Language. In 1986, she was invited to set up and direct an ESL program at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, located at the edge of the Gobi Desert in northwest China. During that year, when not teaching her students, Susan studied the art of the Silk Road and the history of ancient Chinese Central Asia.

In 1991, Susan received her M.P.A. degree in arts administration from the University of Washington and worked with local government agencies to implement public arts policy. She moved to Baltimore in 1993 to work at the Johns Hopkins University. In 1999, she earned an M.A. from UMBC in instructional design, with a concentration in distance education. Over the past eight years, she has worked in the field of online learning. Susan has created and taught several Johns Hopkins University undergraduate and graduate level communication courses.

Twenty years ago, Susan’s goal was to decipher the meaning of a written language composed of pictograms and a spoken language governed by tones. This interest has metamorphosed into a fascination with the cognitive and aesthetic elements that transform learning as mediated by multimedia technologies. Today, as a doctoral student in the LLC program, Susan will concentrate on the language of visual design, computer-mediated visual representation of ideas, multimodal discourse, and visual literacy.

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