Lise Van Susteren
Lise Van Susteren is an American forensic psychiatrist from Bethesda, Maryland, and sister of Fox News legal analyst Greta Van Susteren. In 2006, she sought the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate (from Maryland) but withdrew in April 2006 due to insufficient fundraising.
Lise’s father, Urban Van Susteren, was an elected judge in Appleton, Wisconsin, and Lise worked on his campaign, planting yard signs at the houses of their neighbors. Urban was also a campaign manager for, and good friend of, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, although they eventually came to disagree.
Van Susteren obtained a medical doctorate in 1982 at the University of Paris and later interned at the Hospital St. Anne in Paris, France, at the American Hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly, and at Hospital Tokoin in Lome, Togo. She worked as a resident in psychiatry at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. (then a federal institution) (1983-1987). She was board certified in general psychiatry in 1989 and in forensic psychiatry in 1999 and worked as staff psychiatrist (1985-1991) at the Alexandria Mental Health Center in Alexandria, Virginia and at the Springfield Mental Health Center in Springfield, Virginia (1984-1989). Lise also worked as a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency, conducting psychological assessments of world leaders.[1]
Van Susteren hosted The Doctor Is In, a weekly segment on The Paul Berry Show on AM radio station WTNT-570, Silver Spring, Maryland (January 2003-April 2004). In 1984, Lise cofounded The Friends of St. Elizabeths, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the humane treatment of the mentally ill and the historic preservation of St. Elizabeths Hospital. Through Physicians for Human Rights, Lise has been active in helping refugees seeking political asylum. She has been a volunteer reader for The Metropolitan Washington Ear, an organization which records written material for the blind, since 2000. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina she traveled to Houston to assist those in need of mental health treatment.
In September, 2006, Lise was chosen as one of the first fifty persons to be trained in Nashville by Al Gore to give their version of his global warming slide show, "An Inconvenient Truth." She returned several times to The Climate Project in Nashville to help Gore train 1,000 trainers. In 2007 She was named Eastern Regional Coordinator of the Climate Project. She has presented her global warming slide show to over 100 civic, educational, religious, labor and environmental groups in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, nationally and abroad. In 2008 she developed a slide show on the health effects of global warming which she has presented to the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, American University and other interested medical audiences. In 2009 she was appointed to the Board of The Climate Project.
Lise is a board member of the National Wildlife Federation, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and the Chesapeake Bay Trust. She is amember of the Maryland Commission on Climate and the Maryland Coalition for Health Care Reform.
Lise's husband is Jonathan Kempner, former President and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade association. She and Kempner have three daughters. Lise's mother-in-law, Helen Covensky, was a noted artist and Holocaust survivor.