Health Care Access Advocate
Cleveland, OH

Dr. Susan Klein is a story receiver. Her lifelong love of character-driven novels and biography mirrors her life’s work of seeing how children and their families put their lives together when faced with medical and environmental challenges.

Susan retired from general pediatric neurology practice at Akron Children’s Hospital, Akron, Ohio in July 2021. There, she had been part of a team treating children and adolescents with mild traumatic brain injury. Previously, her focus was more behavioral, including a behavioral pediatric neurology research fellowship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and a mid-career PhD in Experimental Psychology (frontal lobe functioning and intelligence) from Case Western Reserve University. This was capped by many years of clinical management of children with neurologically-based behavioral disorders at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital (Cleveland, Ohio).

Susan met her husband, Eric, as an accident of the alphabet at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. They have a daughter who is an early-career theatre professional. She loves reading almost anything, cooking, movies and dogs.

DCI Fellow: Eric A. Klein, MD