In celebration of Pride Month, this week we are featuring Dr. Susan M. Love, who has dedicated her professional life to ending breast cancer. As founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research, she oversees an active research program centered on finding breast cancer causes and prevention. Prior to this role, she was a Clinical Professor of Surgery at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and a founder and senior partner in LLuminari, a multimedia women’s health company.
Dr. Love has tackled controversial topics in her professional and personal life, including criticizing the medical establishment’s treatment of women, advocating for cancer surgery that conserves as much breast tissue as possible, and fighting to expand the rights of same-sex couples as parents.
In 1996, she retired from the active practice of surgery to dedicate her time to finding the cause and prevention of breast cancer. She has done this in the private and nonprofit arenas, including creating several medical device companies based on the intraductal approach to the breast. Her reputation as an activist comes from her role as one of the “founding mothers” of the breast cancer advocacy movement in the early 1990’s as one of the founders of the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC). She continues this work by serving on the boards of the National Breast Cancer Coalition and Young Survival Coalition. She served on the National Cancer Advisory Board from 1998-2004 as an appointment of President Clinton.
In 1989 she gave birth to a daughter. Following a four-year court battle, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, in a precedent-setting decision, granted Dr. Love and her life-partner, Dr. Helen Cooksey joint adoption rights and changed the birth certificate to give them status as co-parents. Dr. Love has been honored and awarded many times for her lifetime of work, dedicated to the eradication of breast cancer.
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