Susan Montgomery was born in 1943 and grew up in Lansing, Michigan. She did her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan where her advisor was J. E. McLaughlin, who inspired her interest in algebra. Having obtained her undergraduate degree in Mathematics in 1965, Susan received an NSF Graduate Fellowship and started her graduate studies at the University of Chicago. In 1969, she defended her Ph.D. thesis titled “The Lie Structure of Simple Rings with Involution of Characteristic 2” under the supervision of I. N. Herstein. She then spent one year at DePaul University. In 1970, Susan joined the faculty at USC, where she is currently a professor.

Susan received multiple awards and recognition, including a John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1984, an Albert S. Raubenheimer Distinguished Faculty Award from the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at USC in 1985, and a Gabilan Distinguished Professorship in Science and Engineering at USC. In 2012, Susan was selected as an Inaugural Fellow of the AMS and elected as a Fellow of AAAS. Susan served on many professional society committees, including the AMS Board of Trustees in 1986–1996, the Board on Mathematical Sciences of the National Research Council in 1995–1998 and its Executive Committee in 1997–1998, and the AWM Scientific Advisory Committee in 2015–2017. Furthermore, she was elected as vice president of the AMS for the 2014–2017 term. Moreover, she served as the chair of the Mathematics Department at USC in 1996–1999.

While in her early work Susan studied rings with involutions and group actions on rings, her current research is focused on Hopf algebras and their representations. She has published two books and more than 100 research papers; in addition, she was a coeditor for seven collections of papers on various topics in algebra. Her monograph Hopf algebras and their actions on rings became the most cited book on Hopf algebras and quantum groups. Susan graduated 14 PhD students, 6 of which are women.