Lise Van Susteren

Lise Van Susteren is an American forensic psychiatrist in private practice in Washington, DC and environmental activist. In 2006 she sought the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate in Maryland.

Van Susteren received her medical degree in 1982 from the University of Paris and interned at the Hospital St. Anne and the American Hospital in Paris, and at Hospital Tokoin in Lome, Togo. She was a resident in psychiatry at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. She was board certified in general psychiatry in 1989 and in forensic psychiatry in 1999. She worked as a staff psychiatrist at the Alexandria Mental Health Center in Alexandria, Virginia and at the Springfield Mental Health Center in Springfield, Virginia. She also worked as a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency, conducting psychological assessments of world leaders.

Van Susteren is a frequent commentator on television and radio and hosted The Doctor Is In, a weekly segment on The Paul Berry Show on radio station WTNT-570, Silver Spring, Maryland. She co-founded 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, she evaluates and testifies on behalf of refugees seeking political asylum in the United States. She has been a volunteer reader for The Metropolitan Washington Ear, an organization which records written material for the blind. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina she traveled to Houston to assist those in need of mental health treatment.

In September 2006, Van Susteren 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, "An Inconvenient Truth." She returned several times to The Climate Project in Nashville to help Gore train 1,000 presenters. She was named Eastern Regional Coordinator of the Climate Project in 2007 and was elected to its Board of Directors in 2009. She has presented her global warming slide shows to over 100 civic, educational, religious, labor and environmental groups in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, nationally and abroad. In 2008 she developed an additional slide show focused on the health effects of global warming.

Van Susteren is also a member of the Board of Directors of the National Wildlife Federation and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. She was appointed by the Governor of Maryland to be a member of the Board of Trustees of the Chesapeake Bay Trust and to the Working Groups on Transportation and Energy of the Maryland Commission on Climate. In 2009, she was appointed to the Climate Energy and Environmental Policy Committee of the Metropolitan Council of Governments in Washington, DC.

Van Susteren's father, Urban Van Susteren, was an elected judge in Appleton, Wisconsin. Judge Van Susteren was also a campaign manager for Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), although they eventually came to disagree about the Senator's views on communism in government. She has two siblings: Dirk Van Susteren, a journalist, and Greta Van Susteren, host of a national television show, "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren".

Van Susteren's husband is Jonathan Kempner, former President and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association. They have three daughters. Her mother-in-law, Helen Covensky, was a noted artist and Holocaust Survivor.