Susan Puumala

Susan Puumala, Ph.D., an epidemiologist, has joined national architecture firm HDR as senior researcher for HDR’s healthcare, education, science and technology consulting practice. Her responsibilities include working with HDR’s research team to develop studies that investigate how design affects outcomes such as health, wellness, satisfaction and productivity. Coming from the field of public health, Puumala is passionate about improving lives through research. The field of epidemiology, she said, has for many years focused on how to design the best research studies where a randomized design isn’t possible. By applying those methods to design, she hopes to obtain solid answers to predict what will work best and have the greatest impact on health and wellness.

For the past 17 years, Puumala has conducted biomedical and epidemiological research as a statistician/methodologist and epidemiologist. She holds a Master of Science degree in statistics from Iowa State University, and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She has published more than 70 research manuscripts, including research on the comparability and representativeness of control groups in a case-control study of infant leukemia, and has been successful in obtaining grant funding through various sources, including the National Institutes of Health. Additionally, Puumala served as director of the methodology core of the Collaborative Research Center for American Indian Health for more than three years and helped academics and community members develop grant proposal and research projects. For seven years, she was a member of Sanford Health’s Institutional Review Board and helped assess research studies to ensure that research participants were protected.