Susan Hockfield is professor of Neuroscience and President Emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; she served as the sixteenth president from 2004 to 2012 and was the first woman and the first life scientist to lead the Institute. She is currently a faculty member at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Prior to joining MIT, she held positions as the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and provost at Yale University.
After earning a BA in biology from the University of Rochester and a PhD from Georgetown University at the School of Medicine, Hockfield was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at UC San Francisco. She then joined the scientific staff at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York before becoming a faculty member at Yale.
Hockfield serves as a director of Break Through Cancer, Fidelity Non-Profit Management Foundation, Lasker Foundation, Mass General Brigham Incorporated, Pfizer, Inc., Repertoire Immune Medicines, and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. She is a life member of the MIT Corporation and a board member of both the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Cajal Neuroscience. Hockfield has served as a Science Envoy with the US Department of State and was a member of a Congressional Commission evaluating the Department of Energy laboratories. Hockfield is the recipient of the Charles Judson Herrick Award from the American Association of Anatomists, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Award from Yale University, the Meliora Citation from the University of Rochester, the Golden Plate Award from the Academy of Achievement, the Amelia Earhart Award from the Women’s Union, the Edison Achievement Award, the Pinnacle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Geoffrey Beene Builders of Science Award from Research! America, and the Charles L. Branch BrainHealth Award. She has received honorary degrees from national and international universities, and is an elected Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hockfield has recently served as president and chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hockfield’s book, The Age of Living Machines: How Biology will Build the Next Technology Revolution, received the 2020 Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics.
Bio adapted from Koch Institute website