Susan E. Dawson walked into Swedish Covenant Hospital in 1980 as a bench technologist. She left forty-four years later as its Laboratory Administrative Director — having automated it, staffed it through every shortage, and grown three generations of laboratory leaders on the way.
Chemistry, immunoassay, hematology, coagulation, microbiology — Susan came up through all of them, in the era when results were pipetted, plated, and signed one at a time. A Clinical Laboratory Science degree from Augustana College got her in the door; what kept her there was the realisation that a laboratory is a system of people first and instruments second, and that most of what slows a lab down is fixable.
In 2003 — years before it became standard practice — Susan led the automation and autovalidation of four disciplines at once: chemistry, immunoassay, hematology, and coagulation. She has spent more than two decades since optimising middleware, the rules layer that quietly decides how much of your staff's day the instruments give back.
That project taught her the lesson her consulting is built on: the technology is the easy half. The hard half is bringing a bench full of sceptical, overworked professionals along with you — and she did.
The lab that stays ahead is the one where good ideas can come from any bench.
As Laboratory Administrative Director from 2019, Susan was responsible for day-to-day operations, quality, and customer service across hospital laboratories at Swedish Covenant Health, part of Endeavor Health. Budgets tightened, staffing pools shrank, test menus grew — and her answer stayed consistent: optimise the process, invest in the people, and be openly willing to change. Her approach to leading through change is the subject of her SelectScience feature.
Ask the technologists she trained and they will not mention a curriculum. Susan's method is worked examples, honest feedback, and handing people problems slightly bigger than they think they can solve. It filled her lab's supervisor roles from within for decades — and it is the engine behind her book, Growing Into Leadership.
In late 2024 Susan founded Accomplish More Consulting Services. The name is the promise: labs she works with accomplish more with the people and instruments they already have. She consults, speaks nationally and internationally, and writes — because forty-four years of lessons are worth more shared than retired.