Susan Schoolfield is an accomplished healthcare and life sciences executive, strategic advisor, and executive coach with more than 30 years of experience guiding organizations through transformation, growth, integration, and complex enterprise change. Her career has been built around a fundamental leadership principle: sustainable organizational performance occurs when business strategy, people, culture, and leadership are intentionally aligned. Across healthcare, academic medicine, life sciences, medical devices, consulting, government, and nonprofit environments, Susan has partnered with executives and senior stakeholders to translate ambitious strategies into organizational capabilities that deliver meaningful results. Her expertise spans mergers and acquisitions, strategic planning, organizational design, talent strategy, leadership effectiveness, change management, operating-model transformation, executive coaching, and organizational performance.
Susan currently serves as Vice President, Organizational Transformation & Change and Talent Development at Northwell Health, continuing a leadership journey that previously included serving as Vice President of Organizational Transformation & Change and Talent Development at Nuvance Health. Her work has placed her at the intersection of enterprise strategy and the human dimensions of organizational performance. In connection with the Northwell Health and Nuvance Health combination, Susan has helped lead workforce, culture, talent, and organizational integration efforts within one of the nation’s largest nonprofit healthcare environments. Her responsibilities have required thoughtful alignment of organizational structures, leadership practices, talent priorities, and culture while maintaining focus on engagement, retention, patient experience, and operational continuity during significant change.
Before joining Nuvance Health, Susan held senior enterprise change leadership positions at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She built the organization’s Enterprise Change Management function from the ground up, establishing common methodologies, governance, toolkits, communities of practice, analytics, and transformational change capabilities. As her responsibilities expanded, she led integrated change strategies for major initiatives spanning clinical care, business operations, and digital transformation. Working closely with executives, clinicians, and organizational leaders, Susan helped translate strategic priorities into changes in structures, processes, behaviors, and leadership practices. Her work demonstrated her ability not simply to manage individual change initiatives, but to create sustainable enterprise capabilities for navigating transformation repeatedly and effectively.
Susan’s career also includes nearly a decade of global leadership at Becton Dickinson, where she served in progressively responsible organizational effectiveness, change management, and global user adoption roles. Among her most significant assignments was supporting the integration associated with BD’s approximately $24 billion acquisition of CR Bard, an initiative affecting tens of thousands of associates across business units, functions, and international markets. She developed stakeholder engagement and organizational change strategies designed to connect people and operational priorities throughout a complex global environment. Her responsibilities also extended to transformations involving global regulatory operations, R&D, enterprise technology, ERP implementations, outsourcing, supply chain restructuring, and operating-model redesign. These experiences strengthened Susan’s ability to evaluate transformation simultaneously through strategic, operational, technological, and human-capital lenses.
Earlier in her career, Susan served as the People and Change Practice Leader for a life sciences consultancy within Dell EMC/BusinessEdge, where she advised senior healthcare and life sciences executives on transformation, organizational effectiveness, leadership alignment, workforce performance, and organizational design. Her consulting work exposed her to diverse organizational challenges and gave her the opportunity to support major global organizations, including Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Pfizer. Susan also founded and led consulting businesses focused on healthcare management, organizational strategy, and transformation. Through these ventures, she advised organizations such as the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Thomas Jefferson University Health System, and government and nonprofit institutions, helping senior leaders navigate complex change while strengthening organizational performance and leadership effectiveness.
Throughout her career, Susan has distinguished herself through the breadth of her expertise and her ability to connect disciplines that organizations too often address separately. She understands strategic planning, organizational effectiveness, executive leadership, talent management, process improvement, business transformation, and change leadership as interconnected elements of enterprise performance. Her professional capabilities are further reflected in areas including medical devices, executive coaching, organizational design, stakeholder engagement, leadership effectiveness, operational excellence, strategic thinking, and global cross-functional leadership. Her combination of strategic and organizational expertise enables her to engage leaders at the enterprise level while maintaining a practical understanding of what is required to turn strategy into sustained action.
Susan’s perspective is distinctly global. Her professional experience has included significant exposure across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Latin America, giving her an appreciation for the cultural, organizational, and leadership considerations that accompany multinational operations and transformation. She has also shared her experience through speaking engagements with women’s business organizations, healthcare associations, coaching associations, and medical organizations around the world. Her external leadership extends into professional and advisory communities, including service with Nerdy Girl Success, the Institute of Coaching at Mass General Brigham, the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association, and the International Coaching Federation. These engagements reflect a longstanding commitment to developing leaders, advancing professional communities, and contributing expertise beyond the boundaries of her formal executive responsibilities.
Susan complements her extensive executive experience with a multidisciplinary academic foundation. She earned an MBA from Eastern University and completed graduate studies at Bryn Mawr College spanning social work, law and social policy, and educational psychology, following undergraduate study in psychology at the University of Cincinnati. She has also participated in the Yale School of Management Women’s Executive Leadership Program. Her professional credentials include the International Coaching Federation’s Professional Certified Coach designation, Certified Master Black Belt credentials in Lean Six Sigma, Prosci Change Management training, Hogan assessment certifications, and numerous leadership, personality, team, and 360-degree assessment methodologies. This combination of business education, behavioral science, organizational expertise, coaching, and continuous improvement informs a leadership approach that is both analytical and deeply attentive to people.
As an executive coach and senior advisor, Susan brings particular strength to moments when leadership teams are confronting uncertainty, complexity, or significant organizational change. She helps executives establish clarity around strategic objectives, understand the organizational implications of their decisions, create alignment among stakeholders, and develop the leadership capabilities necessary to sustain performance. Rather than viewing transformation as a single program or event, she approaches it as an enterprise capability requiring disciplined execution, effective leadership, measurable adoption, and an organizational culture capable of adapting. Her work consistently centers on helping leaders move from strategic intent to meaningful organizational outcomes.
Susan’s governance and advisory interests represent a natural extension of her executive career. She is particularly interested in contributing to healthcare, life sciences, and medical device organizations, while remaining open to organizations at different stages of development and scale. For emerging and growth-stage companies, she offers experience building organizational capabilities, strengthening leadership, designing scalable structures, and navigating rapid change. For established enterprises, she brings perspective on improving performance, executing transformation, integrating acquisitions, modernizing talent strategies, and aligning organizational capabilities with evolving business priorities. Her experience enables her to ask informed questions about not only where an organization intends to go, but whether its leadership, structure, culture, talent, and operating capabilities are prepared to take it there.
At the center of Susan’s career is a commitment to creating organizations where strategy and human potential reinforce one another. She believes leadership has its greatest impact when executives combine clear business objectives with thoughtful attention to the people responsible for achieving them. Whether advising a CEO, coaching a senior leader, integrating organizations following an acquisition, redesigning an operating model, or helping an enterprise navigate transformation, Susan brings intellectual curiosity, disciplined execution, empathy, and a strong commitment to sustainable results. Her career reflects both the depth of decades of leadership experience and the breadth of having worked nationally and internationally across organizations at very different stages of growth and transformation.
Character:
Susan demonstrates character through a leadership philosophy grounded in integrity, responsibility, empathy, and a genuine commitment to helping organizations and people perform at their highest levels. She approaches complex situations with respect for stakeholders, an appreciation for differing perspectives, and the conviction that lasting organizational results require both disciplined leadership and thoughtful attention to people.
Knowledge:
She brings more than three decades of multidisciplinary expertise across healthcare, life sciences, medical devices, organizational transformation, M&A integration, strategic planning, talent strategy, leadership development, executive coaching, and operational improvement. Her extensive academic preparation, professional certifications, global experience, and enterprise leadership roles allow her to connect business strategy with the organizational capabilities required for execution.
Strategic:
Susan excels at seeing organizations as interconnected systems in which strategy, structure, leadership, talent, culture, technology, and operations must work together to produce sustainable performance. Her experience guiding major transformations and integrations enables her to anticipate organizational implications, establish priorities, align stakeholders, and help leadership teams convert long-term objectives into practical action.
Communication:
An experienced executive advisor, coach, facilitator, and international speaker who can communicate complex organizational issues in ways that create clarity and alignment among diverse stakeholders. Her ability to listen, influence, coach, and engage senior leaders enables her to build productive relationships across executive teams, clinical environments, global organizations, professional associations, and board and advisory settings.
