Susan Bauer-Wu, PhD, RN, integrates the different strands of her four-decades of professional experience in clinical care, scientific research, teaching contemplative practices, and organizational leadership.
Susan is the author of two books,
A Future We Can Love: How to Reverse the Climate Crisis Through the Power of Our Hearts & Minds (2023) and
Leaves Falling Gently: Living Fully with Serious and Life-Limiting Illness Through Mindfulness, Compassion, & Connectedness (2011).
A Future We Can Love is “medicine for despair and anxiety about climate change,” that draws parallels between grief and love for the planet and facing one’s own mortality. A refreshed and expanded version of
Leaves Falling Gently is in press, to be published by Shambhala Publications/Penguin Random House in Spring 2025.
With a foundation as a registered nurse caring for individuals with cancer and mental health challenges as well as those facing the end of life, she pursued PhD studies in psychoneuroimmunology at Rush University in Chicago (funded by an NIH training grant), followed by post-doctoral training in psycho-oncology and behavioral medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. Informed by her clinical practice, Susan’s research throughout her training focused on personal meaning in life and its correlates on measures of immune function and well-being.
An NIH-funded clinical scientist (who received one of the first NIH R01 grants to study meditation in 2005), Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar, and early teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction (completed MBSR teacher clinical practicum training in 1999), Susan has held leadership positions and/or taught at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Emory University, and the University of Virginia (UVA). At UVA, she was an endowed professor in contemplative end-of-life care and director of the Compassionate Care Initiative with dual faculty appointments in Nursing and Religious Studies. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellow and served as president and on the board of the professional society, Society for Integrative Oncology.
In 2021, she was recognized as one of ten of “the most powerful women in the mindfulness movement” by
Mindful. From 2015 through 2023, Susan was the president of the Mind & Life Institute, a non-profit with global reach that was co-founded by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
For more than 25 years, her heart work/service has been teaching and facilitating retreats, workshops, and groups—blending mindfulness and other contemplative practices, creative and expressive therapies, and nature connection, especially for people living with serious illness and their loved ones as well as health care professionals and students, which she has done throughout the United States and internationally.
Susan’s lifelong interest in spirituality has drawn her to explore different wisdom and faith traditions. This includes being a student and practitioner of Buddhist studies and meditation for over three decades. Susan finds meaning in her precious relationships as a wife, mother, grandmother, sister, and friend and in serving as a volunteer, board member, consultant, and advisor to values-aligned organizations and businesses. She lives in central Virginia and is an avid gardener and hiker who is deeply nourished by authentic personal connections, trees, and animals.