I grew up in a family of four girls. We were very closely spaced a year and a half between each of us. I was second. All of my grandparents were immigrants, refugees from Eastern Europe. And my father did what the son of an immigrant does. He went to, studied engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a great engineering school, then, a great engineering school now. He graduated in electrical engineering. He told me later in my life that he had imagined his dream was to be in communications engineering. So he was, of course, there was the war, and he joined the Navy in World War II. When he came back from World War II, he went to law school and became first a patent lawyer and then a corporate lawyer.

My mother had worked in sales for, I think I've forgotten the name of it... Marshall Field, the big department store in Chicago. She did not work while we were young, once we were kind of up and at it, we were all in junior high school and beyond. She became a real estate agent. She loved houses. She just loved houses, and she loved making the match between a person in the right house or the family in the right house, so it was a second career for her, third career. I guess being a mother was really her true second career. But one of the wonderful things was that as again, grandchildren of immigrants, we had certain assignments. My older sister, who is incredibly gifted in the humanities and linguistic arts, was going to be a lawyer. I early on demonstrated some interest and ability in science, and so I was going to be a doctor. And then the two younger ones, whatever. My older sister did not go to law school. She went to graduate school in East Asian studies and became a professor and a researcher. I had a kind of a hard time not going to medical school because I was supposed to do it, but I was dragging my feet.

Susan Hockfield is a neuroscientist whose research focuses on brain development and glioma, pioneering the use of monoclonal antibody technology demonstrating that early experience results in lasting changes in the molecular structure of the brain. She is a Professor of Neuroscience and President Emerita at MIT. She was the first woman and life scientist to serve as MIT’s sixteenth president from 2004-2012.

Hockfield earned her B.A. in biology from the University of Rochester (1973) and a Ph.D. from Georgetown University at the School of Medicine (1979). In 1980, Hockfield completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco. She then joined the scientific staff at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York where she ran her own lab for five years. She also served as director of the Summer Neurobiology Program from 1985 to 1997. In 1985, Hockfield became the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology at Yale University. She went on to serve as the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1998-2002, and Provost from 2003-2004.

In December 2004, Hockfield assumed office as the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She held this role until June 2012 and continues to hold a faculty appointment as professor of neuroscience and as a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Hockfield has received numerous awards including the Charles Judson Herrick Award from the American Association of Anatomists, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Award from the Yale University Graduate School, the Meliora Citation from the University of Rochester, the Amelia Earhart Award from the Women’s Union, and the Yale Science and Engineering Association 2021 Award for Distinguished Service to Industry, Commerce or Education.

She also holds honorary degrees from Brown University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, New York University, Northeastern University, Tsinghua University (Beijing), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Edinburgh, University of Massachusetts Medical School, University of Rochester, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory School of Biological Sciences.