BELMONT, Mass. — Shushan Yeni-Komshian Teager died on August 6, 2024. She was 93.
She was born in 1931 in Beirut, Lebanon, to Helen and Dr. Hovsep Yeni-Komshian, the oldest of five children.
She grew up speaking Armenian, English, French and Turkish, none of which served her well when she started primary school at the British Syrian Training College (BSTC), a missionary run school where classes were taught in Arabic.
In 1949, she left Lebanon to enroll at Wellesley College where she earned a BS in Chemistry in 1952 with the goal of attending medical school. In that era, however, acceptance was not an easy task for either women or foreign students, so she pivoted, enrolling at MIT where she earned a degree in chemical engineering, and more importantly met her future husband, Herbert M. Teager through a fateful meeting at the MIT Armenian Students Association. For him, it was love at first heated discussion. For her, some convincing was in order, but not much. They married in 1953. For a brief time, she worked in Cambridge, developing compounds to seal bottled beverages, after which she and her husband moved to Valejo, Calif., where he served as a lieutenant in the United States Navy, and she was employed as his chief civilian assistant.
Together they pioneered the use of computers in the construction of nuclear submarines, most notably, the USS Sargo (SSN-583). It marked the beginning of a professional partnership that lasted over three decades.
After Herbert completed his military service, the couple moved to Watertown, Mass., where they started a family. Shushan managed to balance the demands of raising two boys while working beside her husband as a research associate first at MIT, and later at Boston University Medical Center, where he was a professor in chief of the Bio-Medical Engineering Department. It was her responsibility not just to help with his research in speech and hearing, but also to keep his laboratory afloat financially through meticulous editing of grant applications and scientific papers. She also managed to make time to take on consulting work, writing computer programs for research in sickle cell anemia.
