Dr. Susan Hockfield President Emerita Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Susan Hockfield served from 2004 to 2012 as the sixteenth president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first life scientist and first woman in that role.  She is now President Emerita, Professor of Neuroscience, Professor of Management, and Member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, at MIT. She also serves on the board of Cajal Neuroscience, a startup focused on neurodegenerative disease.

As president, Hockfield advanced Institute-wide programs in sustainable energy and the convergence of the life, physical and engineering sciences. She has focused on expanding cross-disciplinary opportunities and their translation into life- and world-changing products. She helped shape national policy for energy and next-generation manufacturing, appointed by President Obama in 2011 to co-chair the steering committee of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, and as a member of a Congressional Commission evaluating the Department of Energy laboratories. She has championed roles for women, minorities and people from all nations in inventing the future.

Prior to MIT, she was the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1998-2002), and Provost (2003-2004) at Yale University. She received her B.A. from the University of Rochester and Ph.D. from Georgetown University before joining the faculty at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and then Yale. She has published extensively, in scientific and public media.

She currently serves as a director of Pfizer, Inc., and Repertoire Immune Medicines, and of the non-profit Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. She previously served as a director of the General Electric Company and of Qualcomm, and as president and chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Hockfield is the author of The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution, W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.