Susan Walker, MD, MS, FAAP

Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics
Department of Pediatrics

Narrative Medicine, Medical education, Pediatrics and primary care, Pediatric ethics

Dr. Susan Walker is a primary care pediatrician and medical educator in the Department of Pediatrics at Stony Brook Medicine. She leads a team of seven physicians and allied health professionals at Stony Brook Advanced Pediatric Care in Center Moriches, where she has trained medical students and residents and provided patient care for over twenty years.

Dr. Walker completed her undergraduate training at Cornell University, where she majored in Biology, wrote poetry, and enrolled in as many English classes as her schedule would allow. Believing that the worlds of medicine and literature were somewhat mutually exclusive, she set aside her writing to focus on her medical training. After attending medical school at Cornell University and Case Western Reserve University, where she also earned an MS in Pharmacology, she came to Stony Brook in 1997 for her residency and chief residency and has been here ever since. She has a passion for physician wellbeing and serves as co-chair of the Pediatric Department Wellbeing committee as well co-chair of the Academic Pediatric Association’s Wellbeing and Vitality Special Interest Group.

Along the path from novice to seasoned practitioner, Dr. Walker’s passion for literature was rekindled. She began writing for children in 2017 and earned an Advanced Certificate in Children’s Literature from Stony Brook University the following year. At a workshop run by narrative medicine’s founder Dr. Rita Charon at Columbia University, she was overjoyed to discover others who believe that medicine and literature, far from being mutually exclusive, are in fact intimately connected. Since that time, she has conducted narrative medicine workshops for various student, resident, and faculty groups here at Stony Brook. She is an active participant in Astonished Harvest, a monthly poetry workshop, and is working toward an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature. Her scholarly work focuses on the impact of narrative medicine workshops on wellbeing, team cohesion, self-reflection, and interdisciplinary appreciation. Her first creative writing piece, Parenting Pediatric Residents, was published in Academic Pediatrics in 2022.