Assmann is originally from
Princeton, New Jersey, where she was born on June 26, 1956. Her father, Frederick Fera Assmann (1915–2004) was a chemical engineer for the US Army and Thiokol Chemical Corporation; her mother, Mary Assmann (died 2010), was a science teacher at
The Pennington School. In her doctoral dissertation, Susan Assmann writes that her interest in mathematics "was sparked by the 'interesting test' which constituted part of the application for entrance to the
Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics program", a summer program for high school mathematics students. She was the 1974 valedictorian at
Hopewell Valley Central High School in
Pennington, New Jersey, and a 1978
summa cum laude graduate of
Dartmouth College. She completed a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1983 at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the dissertation
Problems in Discrete and Applied Mathematics supervised by
Daniel Kleitman. Through her joint publications with Kleitman on problems including the
bin covering problem, she has
Erdős number 2. After continuing in academia as a mathematics professor at the
University of Massachusetts Lowell and
Regis College, Assmann came to work for the New England Research Institute (later known as HealthCore), where she continued as a principal statistician for nearly 26 years. Supporting the corresponding shift in her research interests, she received a master's degree in
biostatistics from the School of Public Health & Health Sciences at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1994. ==Personal life==