Sponsor of the lecture series is Sue Fairbanks, a 1981 graduate of the Master of Science in Social Work program at The University of Texas at Austin. Fairbanks retired in July 2018 after 36 years of maintaining a full-time private practice in Austin with adults in individual and couples therapy and providing clinical consultation and supervision. She is a former board member of Austin Psychoanalytic and a former member of UT Social Work’s Dean's Advisory Council. Fairbanks began her professional career as an airline stewardess in the 1960s. During those years, she explored much of the external world while discovering the deeper inner world of the psyche. After graduating from the master's program, Fairbanks completed training to become a Certified Bioenergetic Analyst. Over the years, she trained and developed expertise in post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual abuse, dissociative disorders, gerontology and adoption. Most recently she completed a two-year training program in psychodynamic/psychoanalytic therapy sponsored by the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas.

The thread that brought Fairbanks' different trainings together, along with her concurrent inner search, came about when she entered her own analysis. Fairbanks had the time and space to deeply reflect on her life as she has lived it. The exploratory and reflective nature of psychoanalytic thought knit together her inner search and different trainings into a complex ever-expanding whole. Fairbanks wishes to introduce psychoanalytic knowledge, in its many faceted forms, to students and the helping community so they, too, can have access to the rich knowledge base out of which so many subsequent psychological therapies have been formulated.