Dana L. Suskind

In 2018, Suskind married American economist John A. List. The couple resides in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago with their eight children.

In 2017, Suskind joined with University of Chicago economist John A. List to launch the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health at the University of Chicago. In 2018, the TMW Center selected Palm Beach County, Florida as the site of its first community-wide rollout to embed its evidence-based interventions within existing health, education and social service systems.

Suskind received her B.S. from the University of Missouri–Kansas City and her M.D. from the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine. Suskind completed her residency in otolaryngology head and neck surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and her fellowship in pediatric otolaryngology at the Children's Hospital of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

In 2010, Suskind broadened her focus beyond her patient population and founded the Thirty Million Words Initiative, a translational research program focused on testing and developing parent-centered interventions to boost early learning outcomes for economically disadvantaged children. In 2013, working with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Suskind and colleagues organized a cross-sector convening entitled “Bridging the Thirty Million Word Gap.” In 2015, Suskind's Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain was published by Dutton.

In treating children born with hearing loss across the socioeconomic spectrum, Suskind became increasingly aware of a persistent gap in outcomes among her patient population, as detailed in her popular science book Thirty Million Words. In 2008, Suskind founded Project ASPIRE, a family-centered early intervention program to address this gap and help ensure that all cochlear implant patients receive the rich language exposure implicated in the success of cochlear implantation to reach their full listening and spoken language potential.

In 2002, Suskind joined UChicago Medicine as a pediatric otolaryngologist. In 2007, Suskind founded UChicago Medicine's Pediatric Hearing Loss and Cochlear Implant program.

Suskind was married to Don Liu from 1995 to 2012. In 2012, Liu, then section chief of pediatric surgery and surgeon-in-chief at UChicago Medicine's Comer Children's Hospital, drowned after attempting to rescue two children who were caught in a strong current in Lake Michigan near the town of Lakeside, Michigan.

Dana L. Suskind (born April 7, 1968) is a Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center (UChicago Medicine); director of UChicago Medicine's Pediatric Hearing Loss and Cochlear Implant program; and founder and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health at the University of Chicago.