Susan Rako has been a psychiatrist in private practice in the Boston area for the past thirty-five years. She both trained and taught at Harvard Medical School's Massachusetts Mental Health Center, a teaching hospital in the Department of Psychiatry.

She attended Wellesley College and earned her M.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where she was one of seven women in a class of ninety-eight. Her graduation in 1966 was attended by her daughter, Jennifer, then two and a half years old.

With developed interests in writing and film, Dr. Rako earned a master's degree in film from Boston University's College of Communication in 1988, just before her hormones crashed.

Her search and discovery to find what she could about loss of sexual and vital energy at menopause led her to the stacks of Harvard's Countway Medical Library. In these medical archives, she found information linking testosterone to women's sexuality, which, in turn, led to her writing her book, "The Hormone Of Desire:The Truth About Testosterone. Sexuality, and Menopause "