LISE VAN SUSTEREN, M.D.

Lise received her Doctorate in Medicine in 1982 from the University of Paris. After interning at hospitals in Paris and Lome, Togo, she completed her residency in psychiatry at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. Board certified in both general and forensic psychiatry, Lise worked as a staff psychiatrist in public mental health centers in Alexandria and Fairfax, Virginia.

For over twenty years Lise has maintained a private practice in psychiatry. An Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University and an active member of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia, she has worked to educate the public on mental health issues through writing in professional journals, the press and other media outlets.

A frequent guest on local and national radio and television, Lise has addressed such issues as child protection, teenage drinking, sexual harassment, violence and depression in children and post traumatic stress from the attacks of 9/11 and the Washington area sniper. Through Physicians for Human Rights, she has conducted evaluations of victims of torture seeking asylum in this country and has advocated on their behalf. She has served as a consultant to the CIA where she developed psychological assessments of world leaders. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Lise traveled to Houston to assist those in need of mental health treatment.

In 2005, concerned about the direction the country was taking -- and believing that a background in science and human behavior would strengthen the political process -- she ran for the U.S. Senate seat in Maryland.

In September, 2006, she was chosen as one of the first fifty persons to be trained in Nashville by Al Gore to give her version of his global warming slide show, the basis of the documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” She returned several times to Nashville as a Senior Trainer and in 2007 was named Eastern Regional Director of The Climate Project. She has presented her slide show to over 100 educational, religious, political, environmental and business audiences in the United States and abroad. In the spring of 2008 she developed a second slide show on the “health effects” of global warming which she presented to the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation and American University. During the summer of 2008 she traveled to the Arctic Circle to give presentations on the impact of Global Warming in the Arctic.

She is on the board of the National Wildlife Federation, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and is a member of the working group of the Maryland Commission on Climate. She was recently named by Governor Martin O’Malley to the Board of the Chesapeake Bay Trust.
Lise is married and has three children.

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