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 addresses such issues as psychological disorders in children, teenage drinking, sexual harassment, depression, violence and post traumatic stress disorder. Through Physicians for Human Rights, she conducts evaluations of victims of torture seeking asylum in this country and advocates 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 was subsequently named to the Board of Directors 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. She has traveled to the Arctic to lecture on the impact of global warming there and frequently lectures on the health effects of climate change. In March 2009, she organized the first national meeting on the psychological effects of climate change - sponsored by the National Wildlife Federation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In January 2010, she traveled to Haiti to provide disaster relief to the victims of the earthquake.

She is on the Board of Directors of the National Wildlife Federation and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and was a member of the working group on Transportation and Energy of the Maryland Commission on Climate. She was named by Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley to the Board of the Chesapeake Bay Trust. In the fall of 2009 she joined the Advisory Board of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

Lise is married and has three children.

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