Tribute to Susan Neal

We are sad to hear of the sudden passing of Susan Neal, former administrator and assistant director of the Superfund Research Program (SRP) at UC Berkeley. Susan supported me in my early career as an Assistant Professor and helped me tremendously in securing research funding. She administered our SRP from its inception and recruited Minerva (Minnie) Reyes to help her manage the finances. Both Susan and Minnie have been tremendous servants to the SRP, the Environmental Health Sciences Division and the School of Public Health as a whole. Susan organized wonderful annual meetings of our Program and was greatly admired by staff at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the sponsors of our SRP Center for over 30 years. Susan also realized early on the importance of Children’s Environmental Health and helped me bring the Children’s Environmental Health Network (CEHN) led by Joy Carlson into our SRP as its Outreach program. The CEHN was instrumental in developing the field and helped develop the idea and funding for Children’s Environmental Health Centers. Berkeley was fortunate enough to initially have 3 of these Centers and Susan’s passion for this subject led her to take on the role of administrator for Brenda Eskenazi’s superb Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health, which has made such great contributions to the field of public health. Susan helped me renew the SRP grant at Berkeley many times. One of my dearest memories of her, which also showed her tremendous dedication, was our drive to FedEx at Oakland airport late on a Sunday night to drop off more than two boxes containing multiple copies of a 900-page proposal that she had carefully put together. Because of this rush to the airport, we made the NIH deadline and were funded for five more years. I have many other fond memories of Susan and especially appreciated how many students, post-docs and other staff she helped unselfishly during her career at Berkeley. She will be greatly missed.