Suzanne M. Rivera (born 1969) is an American bioethicist who is the president of Macalester College. She is the first female and first Latina president in the college's history.[1][2] Rivera's presidential Inauguration ceremony was held at Macalester on October 9, 2021.[3] Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz proclaimed it as "Suzanne M. Rivera Day" in the state.[4]
Rivera was born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, in 1969. She moved to Massachusetts in 1980, and attended high school at The Cambridge School of Weston. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University, and was the commencement orator for the class of 1991. Immediately following her undergraduate studies, Rivera earned a Master of Social Welfare degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993.[5]
Career
Rivera competed for and was awarded a Presidential Management Internship in 1993 and used it to rotate through the Region IX offices of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She then took a job in the Head Start Branch of the Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families in San Francisco, California. She moved to Irvine, California, in 1996, where she began her career in research administration and research ethics, first as a review officer in University of California, Irvine's Office of Research Administration and eventually became director of that office.[6]
From 2011–2020, Rivera worked at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio. While serving as Vice President for Research and Technology Management, she also served on the CWRU faculty in the Departments of Bioethics and Pediatrics.[7]
She has done field research in Costa Rica,[9] and has been an invited lecturer on bioethics for the Ministry of Higher Education in Havana, Cuba, and at Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Mbarara, Uganda.
Civic activities
Rivera was a member of the American Association of Universities' (AAU) Task Force on Strategies for Reducing Sexual Harassment and Gender Discrimination.
She served as First Vice President on the Board of Esperanza, Inc., a non-governmental organization devoted to improving educational outcomes for Cleveland's Hispanic students, and on the governance committees for Cleveland's Fund for Our Economic Future (FFEF) and the Cleveland Water Alliance.
She currently serves on the board of the Science Museum of Minnesota;[10] the national board of directors of College Possible,[11] a national college access and success nonprofit; and the National Advisory Board of TeenSharp,[12] an organization that prepares students from historically excluded groups for success at selective colleges and universities. She is a co-founder and member of the executive council of the Liberal Arts Colleges Racial Equity Leadership Appliance (LACRELA). Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan named Rivera to the Executive Council for the Young Women's Initiative of Minnesota (YWI) in January 2021.[13]
In November 2020, Rivera offered to help cover the costs of bail if any Macalester College student was arrested during protests related to the 2020 presidential general election.[14]
In January 2021, Rivera announced a partnership between Macalester College and the Posse Foundation to increase the numbers of Black, Indigenous and other students of color at the college.[15]
Personal life
Rivera's husband, Michael Householder, is a scholar of Early American Literature and author of the book Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery: Narratives of Encounter (Ashgate, 2011). They met at Brown University and have two children together.[2]
Holly Fernandez Lynch; Barbara E. Bierer; I. Glenn Cohen; Suzanne M. Rivera, eds. (2017). Specimen Science. Cambridge: The MIT Press. ISBN9780262036108.
Rivera, Suzanne (2014). "Reconsidering Privacy Protections for Human Research". In Cohen, I. Glenn; Holly Fernandez Lynch (eds.). Human Subjects Research Regulation: Perspectives on the Future. Philadelphia: MIT Press. ISBN9780262526210.
