Susan McMillan, DVM/Owner,

Susan McMillan is a sixth generation Chicagoan but has moved many times. She worked in the Washington, DC area for twelve years before attending the University of Wisconsin - Madison, School of Veterinary Medicine where she received the Academic Leadership Award in 1995, and the Clinical Competency Award upon graduating in 1997.
For five years, Susan worked at a small animal practice in Fairbanks, Alaska. Work shifts overflowed with surgery and medicine and lots of sled dogs and consults with people far off the road system (‘bush’ medicine). Emergency duty meant nights and weekends on call and lots of ‘kicked by moose’ and porcupine quills. This gives one the chance to experience endless sunlit nights in summer and northern lights in winter. Susan was also a volunteer vet for many sled dog races including the Yukon Quest, Quest 250, Junior Quest, and Copper Basin 300.  She mostly enjoyed the slower pace with the rookie back-of-the-pack mushers whose goal was to finish with a happy team of dogs.
With long work hours but three day weekends, Susan got to explore Alaska. Miles and miles of hiking, cycling, and snowshoeing the back country left almost no time for trouble. Living in a small cabin in the woods 12 miles north of Fairbanks, Susan lived with Killian (the wonder dog!), and feline pals Fang and Blu.
Upon leaving Alaska, Susan did some veterinary relief work in San Diego where she launched Petcounselor.com, an on-line veterinary second-opinion venture. In 2003, Susan, Kit and their dog Killian went on a 17,000 mile road trip across America looking for the perfect place to land and found Vermont. They started Vet To Pet Mobile Veterinary Service in 2005. When it was time to get the business and inventory out of the house, it seemed that Burlington needed a basic storefront veterinary clinic. Voila! The Old North End Veterinary Clinic was born in November 2008. 
Susan was the Humane Society of Chittenden County’s veterinarian for 12 years until joining the HSCC Board of Directors in 2014. She received the HSCC June Davis award in 2006 and the Veterinary Partner Award in 2012. She was Board Chair until 2020 when she resigned to spend more time with her mother who was not getting any younger. She is a Past-President of the Greater Burlington Academy of Veterinary Medicine and is a member of the VVMA. Since 2011, she has been on 620 AM radio ‘Pet Talk’ once/month with her vet pals, Millie Armstrong and Peggy Larson. They discuss pet issues and a whole lot more. Susan has also been a guest on Vermont Edition a couple of times.
Since there is always enough time for more, Susan was a Special Olympics coach in Madison and she was a Big Sister with Big Brothers/Big Sisters in Fairbanks. She also trained with Wilderness Search and Rescue in Fairbanks but resigned after spending one very long summer night looking for a missing boy in the hills outside Fairbanks. She later learned she’d encountered the murderer while searching. Yikes, too emotional and creepy. Susan bicycled across the state of Montana, raising $17,000 for AIDS vaccine research in 2001. She wrote for and was the Assistant Editor of Vermont’s Out InThe Mountains (LGBTQ) newspaper for a couple of years. She went to Haiti after the earthquake and was an original board member of the Vermont Medical Response Team in 2010. She was also briefly on the Board of Vermont First working for equal marriage.
Susan and Kit share their home with Fury (the elder cat from the Humane Society of Chittenden County), Scoop (a lanky HSCC feline who drools when she is happy (yuck!)) and Monkey (the Southern Rescue Dog who is truly the perfect dog).
Susan’s parents moved to Vermont in 2013 when her Dad’s dementia got to be too much to handle for her mother alone. They have both since passed away but Susan and Kit got to spend a whole lot of time with them in their last few years on this earth.
While Susan enjoys hiking, walking, running, water skiing, snowshoeing, gardening, and drawing, she has actually spent many years just studying. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from American University in 1982 with a BA in Criminal Justice. In 1987, she graduated with a JD from the George Washington University National Law Center, having been a Student Director of the Bankruptcy and Consumer Law clinics. After that she worked in consumer protection at the county level and was the Courts and Drugs Reference Specialist for the Department of Justice National Criminal Justice Reference Service. How fun does all that sound?
In 2008 Susan and Kit hiked the Grand Canyon, 24 miles from the South Rim to North Rim, in 15 hours. They did it again (north to south) in 2011 with seven friends. They attempted but did not conquer Mt. Whitney (tallest peak in the lower 48) in 2013. In the winter of 2016, they revisited the Grand Canyon but relaxed, hiking down to the bottom where they finally were not in a hurry to get to the other side. They spent three nights at Phantom Ranch before hiking out. In the fall of 2019, Susan hiked with her brother and two other friends from the South Rim to Plateau Point and back out. Susan and Kit are currently contemplating their next extreme day hike and more travels. Since there is no such thing as too much school, Susan is currently studying to become a Deacon in the Episcopal Church.

The Grand Canyon, Rim to Rim, Extreme Day Hike

Elizabeth Poulsen DVM
(But this is Charlie, not Liz!)

Elizabeth lives in Charlotte with her husband, also a vet and an Animal Science professor at UVM, and her dog and cat. She graduated from University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine in 1992 after completing an Associate’s degree in Rural Resource Management at Sterling College in Vermont and a Bachelor’s in Animal Science at University of Connecticut. Liz has studied veterinary homeopathy in depth, though is currently only practicing conventional medicine. She also taught horseback riding to differently abled people for several years, and has served on the boards of Sterling College and Lake Champlain Waldorf School. For fun she loves walking, gardening, horseback riding, knitting, reading and practicing and teaching yoga. Liz has 2 grown sons who also live in Vermont (which makes her very happy!) She is so glad to be at the Old North End Clinic caring for our pet friends and working with wonderful people.

Kit Roberts
Practice Manager/Owner
with Killian, Charlotte VT

Born and raised in Indiana, Kit is actually a southern Californian at heart. She majored in education and played women’s basketball for Indiana University. She moved from the Midwest as soon as possible after college but is still a closet Colts fan. Kit spent the first half of her adult life in Phoenix, San Diego, and Los Angeles.

After student teaching in Indiana and realizing that the classroom was not for her, Kit started her working career as a wilderness educator. For eight years she ran an outward bound style program for kids in the Phoenix high schools. She organized and guided adventure trips to Colorado, Utah, Hawaii, Mexico, and Europe. Most of the time, she stayed closer to home and taught skiing, back packing, rock climbing, wilderness survival, and lots of old fashioned life lessons in the desert and high desert of Arizona. She also participated in the National Outdoor Leadership School.

After leaving Arizona, Kit began a lifelong career search, tackling every opportunity that came along. She is truly a jack of all trades and has been a small business owner several times over. Kit designed and sold women’s athletic clothing (Fine Line Design), performed interior faux painting (Finely Finished). She has sold cars, water purifiers, and real estate, has studied feng shui, and was a partner in an event coordinating company in Los Angeles (The Dog and Pony Show). Kit has her Commercial Drivers License and has studied acupuncture. From the mid-90s until 2001, Kit traveled extensively for Pallotta Teamworks organizing large scale athletic fund raising events, including many 3-Day Breast Cancer Walks and the AIDS Vaccine Rides. Kit spear headed The Seed Fund which was a small organization dedicated to getting surplus goods from local businesses into the hands of worthy non-profits.>

Kit is a fantastic cook and loves to walk, hike, go to the movies, snow shoe, sew, read, travel and harvest a share at the Intervale Community Farm. She and Susan volunteered as ushers with the Lake Monsters in 2010. She was active in the grass roots effort to achieve equal marriage in Vermont. She has three times hiked the Grand Canyon, most recently hiking rim to rim in 15 hours in September, 2011.

Kit now manages Vet To Pet Mobile and the Old North End Veterinary Clinic. She books appointments, sends reminders, does the finances and taxes, maintains the computers, software, printer and phones, manages the cleaners, the security, the government agencies and the vendors, and is the first and last person every client sees. Now that is a jack of all trades!

Both Kit and Susan visit their parents as often as possible and Kit helps care for her recently widowed father who still lives at their old family home in Indianapolis.

Crystal Renaud, Head Technician

Crystal was born and raised in Vermont. In the late 90’s after graduating with her Social Services degree from Champlain College, she moved to Massachusetts. She started out counseling adolescents then found herself taking an unexpected career change and began working for a veterinary hospital in 2000. She started as a receptionist and was fortunate enough to be trained as an assistant and then a veterinary technician. Apparently a true calling as she has been in this field since. 
After saying she would never come back to Vermont she found herself right back to her roots in 2006. She has been the Head Veterinary Technician at two different hospitals here in Vermont before becoming a part of the Old North End team in 2014. Her interests are animal behavior, weight management, dentistry and loves blood draws (the hospital vampire). Crystal has also worked with rescues and has fostered several animals from bunnies to dogs.
Crystal is the proud mom of two little humans, Chase & Wesley. If you are lucky some days in the clinic her youngest,Wesley, will be there “assisting” and also accompanies mom and Dr. McMillan on house calls. Her furry family includes the family adopted cat Horsey (named by her oldest son when he was three) an adopted rescue dog named Zuma, and there are also chickens. 
Crystal is passionate about health and fitness and it is important to her to be active. She is an avid runner and occasionally Zuma will join in, she’s a fantastic running partner. She also enjoys yoga, walking in the woods and hiking adventures with her boys.