She was a frosty girl, plain and colorless, who protected herself against a world she disliked by a mask-like expression and a hypertrophy of intellect.

Graduating with a bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 2003, she began post-graduate work in cybernetics, learning to construct positronic brains such that responses to given stimuli could be accurately predicted.

In Asimov's stories, her emotionless brilliance is portrayed positively, when she solves issues with robots manufactured by her company.

Asimov's own stories leave her misanthropy largely unexplained, but Harlan Ellison's screenplay adaptation of I, Robot investigates its origins, and in the end concludes that her attitudes are rather well-founded.

An excerpt from Harlan Ellison's screenplay adaptation of I, Robot said of Calvin: She is a small woman, but there is a towering strength in her face.

[1] Ann Firbank portrayed the character serving the same function, renamed Inge Jensen, in the Out of the Unknown adaptation of "Satisfaction Guaranteed".

A character named Dr. Susan Calvin (played by Marilyn Erskine) appears in the episode "Sun Gold" of the American anthology TV series Science Fiction Theater.

Taking a cue both from the framing sequence of I, Robot and from Citizen Kane, the film would have presented incidents from Calvin's earlier life, in which she would figure prominently, even if absent in the original story.

Arthur C. Clarke mentions Susan Calvin several times alongside Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper: In his novel 3001: The Final Odyssey she appears as a female "role-model" in "the battle of wits between man and machine" (Chapter 36: Chamber of Horrors); in The Ghost from the Grand Banks Clarke refers to "the small pantheon of famous women programmers" while he puts one of the novel's characters in a league with the three aforementioned ladies (Chapter 4: The Century Syndrome).

Susan Calvin also appears in David Wingrove's illustrated book The Immortals of Science Fiction"(1980).