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Remembering Suzanne Ledin
SUZANNE LEDIN was born in 1947 in Huntington, Long Island, New York. She was the oldest child of Catherine Rose Smith and Robert Martin Fisher. Suzanne began her lifelong dedication to laboratory science and biotechnology by working for Ryker Labs in San Fernando Valley, California, during her last two years of high school. She graduated in 1965 from Bishop Alemany High School in Mission Hills, California. While studying Biology at the University of San Francisco, Suzanne worked as a laboratory technician on a contract for the Apollo Project. It was in this laboratory that Suzanne met her devoted husband George; they married in 1968. Suzanne graduated from USF in 1969 and in the next year trained at St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco, earning her Medical Technologist license from the American Society for Clinical Pathology. Over the next seven years, Suzanne worked at various hospital laboratories in San Francisco and gave birth to her daughter Kathryn in 1970 and her son Alexander in 1977. Suzanne completed her MS in medical technology at San Francisco State University in 1978. She spent 1979 as an intern at Irwin Memorial Blood Bank (now Blood Centers of the Pacific), where she was one of the favorite students of Dr. Herbert Perkins, and was certified as a Specialist in Blood Banking in 1980. After receiving her SBB, Suzanne worked briefly at Peninsula Memorial Blood Bank in Burlingame, California, before becoming assistant supervisor of transfusion services at the University of California, San Francisco’s Moffitt Hospital. In 1989, Suzanne was hired by Genetic Systems Corporation, a Seattle-based biotechnology company that joined Sanofi Diagnostics in 1992. At Sanofi, Suzanne received many recognitions, including the very first Blood Virus Field Technical Representative of the Year award in 1992, and the Infectious Disease Specialist of the Year awards in 1996 and 1997. Looking for opportunities closer to home, Suzanne joined Chiron Corporation in October of 1998 as the first Director of the Chiron Nucleic Acid Testing (NAT) Training Laboratory. At Chiron, Suzanne designed, staffed, and supervised the NAT Training Laboratory, training many international laboratory groups. Her friendship and enthusiasm for her Chiron coworkers did not flag even after Suzanne was diagnosed with cancer in April 2001. She continued working with her team until a few months before her death on February 17, 2002.
If you would like to contribute photographs or brief stories about Suzanne, please email us at gledin@micromental.com subject heading: Remembering Suzanne.
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