Susan McDonough is a social worker whose research examines how social and family factors affect the mental health of young children thereby impacting their development and learning. Her current research explores how environmental risk factors and parent-infant relationship problems mediate the connection between early behavior problems and later emotional, social, and cognitive functioning. She is also testing an intervention to prevent problems of physiological regulation in infants from becoming later mental health and learning problems. This preventive intervention to reduce parent-infant relationship problems in families is currently being evaluated in the U.S. and abroad. Other research examines parent-infant interactions of adolescent parents and their infants, cognitively-limited parents and their offspring, and substance-exposed infants and their caregivers, as an indicator of the parent-infant relationship.

In 1999, McDonough recieved an Award for Oustanding Contributions to Infant Mental Health from the Australian Association of Infant Mental Health.