Suzanne Rivera

Rivera was born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York in 1969. She is the oldest of four children, her mother was born in the United States and her father was born in Cuba. She moved to Massachusetts in 1980, and attended high school at The Cambridge School of Weston. She attended Brown University, and was the commencement orator for the class of 1991.

After earning her MSW at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993, she worked for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families in San Francisco, CA. She moved to Irvine in 1996, where she began her career in research administration and research ethics, first as a review officer in UC Irvine's Office of Research Administration, and eventually becoming the Director of that office[5]. She pursued a doctorate in Public Administration at the University of Texas at Dallas, earning her Ph.D. in Public Affairs (health policy) in 2008, while working at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in the office of the provost and research services under Alfred G Gilman.

From 2011-2020, she served on the faculty at Case Western Reserve University in the Departments of Bioethics and Pediatrics.

She is the Vice President of the Board of Public Responsibility in Medicine & Research (PRIM&R), and is a Member-at-large for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Social, Economic, and Political Sciences section committee. Previously, she was a Board member on the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR) and served as an appointed member of the EPA’s Human Studies Review Board and the DHHS Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections.

She has done field research in Costa Rica[6], 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.

She is active in social justice and equity initiatives. She is a member of the American Association of Universities’ (AAU) Task Force on Strategies for Reducing Sexual Harassment and Gender Discrimination. She was a Fellow of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities’ (HACU) Academia de Liderazgo[7].

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.

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. They have two children together.[8]

• Julia Jacobsen Distinguished Service Award, National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA), 2018[9]
• Diversity Leadership Award, Case Western Reserve University, 2012[10]
• Pi Alpha Alpha (public affairs honor society), 2007
• Alumni Distinguished Service Award, Brown University, 2001[11]

• Holly Fernandez Lynch; Barbara E. Bierer; I. Glenn Cohen; Suzanne M. Rivera, eds. (2017). Specimen Science. Cambridge: The MIT Press. ISBN 9780262036108.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
• Rivera, Suzanne (December 2008). "Clinical Research from Proposal to Implementation: What Every Clinical Investigator Should Know about the Institutional Review Board". J Investig Med. 56 (8): 975–984. doi:10.2310/JIM.0b013e31818e1da9.
• Fernandez-Lynch, H., Bateman-House, A. and Rivera, S.M. (January 2020). "Academic Advocacy: Opportunities to Influence Health and Science Policy under U.S. Lobbying Law". Academic Medicine. 95 (1).CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Householder, M., Solano-Lopez, A. L., Muñoz, D. and Rivera, S.M. (January–February 2019). "Reviving Human Research in Costa Rica". Ethics & Human Research. 41 (1). doi:10.1002/eahr.500004.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: date format (link)
• Rivera, Suzanne (2011). "Institutional Review Board Approval". In McPhaul, M.J. and Toto, R.D. (ed.). Institutional Review Board Approval. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. ISBN 978-1605477480.
• Rivera, Suzanne (2014). "Reconsidering Privacy Protections for Human Research". In Cohen, I. Glenn and Holly Fernandez Lynch (ed.). Human Subjects Research Regulation: Perspectives on the Future. Philadelphia: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262526210.</ref>