Susan Hockfield

Dr. Hockfield is Professor of Neuroscience and President Emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She served as MIT’s sixteenth president from 2004 to 2012 and was the first woman and the first life scientist to lead MIT. She is also a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Prior to joining MIT, she was at Yale University as the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1998 to 2002 and Provost from 2002 to 2004. Her research pioneered early applications of molecular biology to neuroscience, and she is the author of a recent book, “The Age of Living Machines: How Biology will Build the Next Technology Revolution,” in which she describes the transformational technologies emerging from a convergence of biology with engineering.

In addition to her professional accomplishments, Dr. Hockfield has a long record of service to public, non-profit and business organizations. She served as Science Envoy to Turkey with the U.S. Department of State and as a member of a Congressional Commission evaluating the Department of Energy laboratories. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where she recently served as president then chair. She also serves as a director of the Fidelity Non-Profit Management Foundation, Lasker Foundation, Mass General Brigham, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and is a life member of the MIT Corporation. She is a director of Pfizer Inc. and a past director of General Electric Company and Qualcomm.

Dr. Hockfield received a B.A. in Biology from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in Anatomy and Neuroscience from Georgetown University School of Medicine. She also holds honorary degrees from many institutions, including Brown University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Northeastern University, Tsinghua University (Beijing), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Edinburgh, University of Massachusetts Medical School, University of Rochester, and the Watson School of Biological Sciences at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.