March 05, 2025
DR. SUZET M. MCKINNEY
MEMBER, CIVIC FEDERATION BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Number of years with the Federation: 3
Dr. Suzet M. McKinney is a commercial real estate executive, corporate board director, public health expert, medical executive, thought leader, strategic thinker and nationally recognized expert in emergency preparedness and response.
As Principal and Director of Life Sciences for Sterling Bay, Dr. McKinney oversaw relationships with the scientific, academic, corporate, tech, and governmental sectors involved in the life sciences ecosystem. She also led the strategy to expand Sterling Bay’s footprint in life sciences nationwide. She previously served as CEO and Executive Director of the Illinois Medical District, where she managed a 24/7/365 environment that included 560 acres of medical research facilities, four hospitals, labs, a biotech business incubator, universities, raw land development areas, and more than 40 healthcare-related facilities. Within two years of leadership, Dr. McKinney accomplished a financial turnaround of the IMD, successfully retiring more than $40 million in debt. She also envisioned and initiated a development boom in the District, with nearly $1B in projects underway and an additional $500M in projects in the pipeline at the time of her departure in early 2021. Dr. McKinney’s vision included development of a 30-acre life sciences innovation park, clustering healthcare, science and technology-based companies and institutions while also advancing economic development in one of Chicago’s most underserved communities.
In 2020, Dr. McKinney was appointed by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker as Operations Lead for the State of Illinois’ Alternate Care Facilities, a network of alternate medical locations designed to decompress the healthcare system during the COVID-19 pandemic. She collaborated with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and multiple construction, architecture and project management teams to prepare five facilities to open for overflow patient care.
Dr. McKinney is also an experienced on-camera expert who has frequently discussed real estate investment, real estate development trends, healthcare disparities, economic and racial inequities amplified by the pandemic, climate-related emergencies, biological and chemical threats and natural disasters. She’s been featured on CNN, ABC, NBC Nightly News, and in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Crain’s Chicago Business and The Chicago Tribune, among other notable publications.
Prior to leading the IMD, Dr. McKinney served as the Deputy Commissioner of the Bureau of Public Health Preparedness and Emergency Response at the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH), where she oversaw the emergency preparedness efforts for the Department and coordinated those efforts within the larger spectrum of the City of Chicago’s Public Safety activities, in addition to overseeing the Department’s Division of Women and Children’s Health. She also provided support to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), lending subject matter expertise in biological terrorism preparedness to the country of Poland.
Previously, she served as the Sr. Advisor for Public Health and Preparedness at the Tauri Group, where she provided strategic and analytical consulting services to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS), BioWatch Program. Her work at DHS included providing creative, responsive and operationally based problem-solving for public health, emergency management and homeland security issues, specifically chemical and biological early detection systems and the implementation of those systems at the state and local levels.
Dr. McKinney serves on numerous boards and advisory committees. Her current board memberships include the Board of Directors for Kemper Corporation (Risk and Compensation Committees), Wintrust Financial Corporation (Audit and Compensation Committees), Lurie Children’s Hospital (Quality & Credentialing Committee), and Thresholds (Executive Committee). Dr. McKinney is the former Co-Chair of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), Health and Medicine Division’s Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Disasters and Emergencies. She also serves on NASEM’s Board of Health Sciences Policy, and is the former Chairperson of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC), Center for Public Health Preparedness and Response. She is a member of The Chicago Network, and the Economic Club of Chicago.
In academia, Dr. McKinney serves as an Instructor in the Division of Translational Policy and Leadership Development at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Health Policy Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. She is the co-author of the text: Public Health Emergency Preparedness: Practical Solutions for the Real World (2018) and was named Real Estate Journal’s Woman of the Year (2022), one of Chicago’s Top 50 Business Leaders of Color (2021), one of Chicago’s 50 Most Powerful Women (2020), and one of Chicago’s Notable Women in Healthcare (2018 & 2019).
Dr. McKinney holds her Doctorate degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, with a focus on preparedness planning, leadership and workforce development. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Brandeis University (Waltham, MA) where she was also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow. She received her Master of Public Health degree (Health Care Administration) and certificates in Managed Care and Health Care Administration from Benedictine University in Lisle, IL.
You are a more recent board member of the Civic Federation, joining us in 2022. What drew you to our work and what do you think of the Civic Federation’s value in Chicago’s civic community?
I was drawn to the Civic Federation due to its commitment to informing the public about how our governments in Cook County, Chicago, and Illinois operate and how those operations affect everyday life and business. I believe it is our duty as business leaders to be informed, to provide wise counsel when needed, and to help others understand.
What do you find most exciting about where the Federation is going, particularly in light of our new President and Strategic Plan? What is your greatest wish for the Civic Federation for the road ahead?
I believe that new leadership brings new vision and new creativity to age-old challenges. If there is anything I’m most excited about, it would be Joe’s experience prior to the Civic Federation. He understands these issues all too intimately, having served as the City’s inspector general for so many years. The new strategic plan will be an operational blueprint to guide us not just in what we need to be doing but also in HOW we will go about it. It will bring greater accountability and efficiency to the organization and our work, and THAT is exciting to me!
Your career has spanned government, nonprofit, healthcare, real estate, and all the ways those areas can intersect. In your view, what are some of the most effective ways, and what is needed, for these sectors to collaborate to improve public health outcomes?
I pride myself on being a “tri-sector leader,” one who can successfully engage and collaborate across the public, private, and social sectors. These experiences have provided me with transferable skills that have enabled me to transverse multiple industries, see parallels between sectors, assess the contextual differences and translate across them, and transcend single-sector constraints when it is necessary to approach challenges from a multi-sector framework. It’s the multi-sector thinking that I believe can best help these sectors collaborate to improve public health outcomes and societal challenges. If more business leaders approached societal challenges with compassion, and more social/non-profit leaders approached societal challenges with a business mindset, I believe we would be a lot further along in doing what needs to be done for the most vulnerable among us, and our county, city, state, and country would be a lot better off than we are right now.
As Operations Lead for Illinois’ Alternate Care Facilities during the pandemic, you played a crucial role in crisis management. What leadership lessons did you learn during this time that you are applying today?
My leadership journey has been shaped by a commitment to excellence, a standard to embrace strategy and innovation to propel beyond the status quo, and the drive to seek solutions to the most complex problems of the day. I like to believe that these things caused Gov. Pritzker to ask me to lead Operations for the State’s ACFs during COVID, as it was one of the most complex challenges our society had faced since the 1918 pandemic. I apply those lessons, experiences, and skills everywhere I go.
You are deeply invested in the health and wellbeing of Chicagoans, currently serving on the Board of Lurie Children’s Hospital and Thresholds, among others. In your experience, what are the key elements that make a nonprofit organization successful in driving meaningful outcomes?
I believe nonprofit organizations must be fully aware of their mission and the goal of their work, be strategic in how they approach that work, be intentional about developing plans for achievement and efficiency, and be relentless in their pursuit of excellence. You must have all those elements to drive meaningful outcomes and resist being a proverbial “seat warmer.” I currently chair the board of the Chicago Urban League, and I’ve dubbed myself “Agitator in Chief” because I view my job in that role as one that pushes the board and the staff to drive meaningful outcomes and to constantly ask ourselves how can we do our work better and more efficiently and push beyond the status quo.
What impact are you trying to make and what types of challenges are you most often working to address?
As someone who calls myself a leader, I believe it is my duty to share my time and talent with those who are more vulnerable than I. And I believe the same can be said for all of us who consider ourselves to be leaders; it’s the rent we should pay for taking up space on this earth. My goal is simply to make a positive impact on someone. At the end of the day, for every place that I touch, either through employment or volunteerism, I just want people to be able to say that the place was made better because I was there.
What's your favorite Chicago hidden gem?
That’s hard because there are so many gems in Chicago. Perhaps my favorite Chicago gem is the lakefront, and my favorite hidden gem is Taste222, a West Loop restaurant owned by Don & Liz Thompson.
What do you most enjoy doing in your free time?
Spending time with my daughter, who is the light of my life. I also enjoy spending time with friends, especially patronizing Chicago’s culinary and theater scenes.