I have been very fortunate with my mentors. I wish I'd had one in college. And it wasn't until my penultimate semester that I found someone who could have been. And sadly, I didn't go back to him. Happily, I did remember much later to actually thank him. I wrote him a thank you note because he was the person who really set my life on the course that's been so wonderful. So, it's important to find people.

My first really important mentor was Steve Gobel, my graduate advisor. Hugely important in terms of science, how you do science, how you think about science, how you live your life. He was just an enormously important figure in my life. In retrospect, there were people quietly in the background who were helping me. I know now that it was the Chair of the Department of Anatomy who put me forward for this wonderful summer position at the National Institutes of Health. But Steve was fantastic. And in that group, it's one of the reasons why I love these multidisciplinary groups. There were a couple of people, I was friendly with everyone, but there was a marvelous neurophysiologist named Donald Price who became a close friend, but he was a mentor in that he opened up areas of inquiry that I would never have thought to look at. There was a postdoc there named Mary Ann Ruda, M. A. Ruda, who also kind of was a couple steps ahead of me and simply hanging out with her gave me a sense of what to do next, how to think about problems.

So you know that whole group was very, very so impactful. And then just to kind of skip to the end of the story, or not the end, kind of the pinnacle of the story. When I was president, I had very quietly in the background, three wise men. And when I found myself just too deep to be able to see which way to go, I would call them. So, one was Rick Levin, the president of Yale. My mentor, my very important mentor was Dean and Provost. He basically taught me how to do those jobs and how to be a mentor myself. The second was Vartan Gregorian, who was head of the Carnegie Foundation. Amazing man. He'd been president of a number of places, including Brown [University], and very wise, very deep, both, you know all of these three. And the third was Gerhard Casper, the former president of Stanford. And what I learned then is something I wish I had learned earlier; people love being asked for advice. And I'm sorry in retrospect that I didn't call on them more frequently because they invariably could see things that I couldn't see, gave me advice, or frankly simply gave me courage to do the things that needed to be done. But I wasn't sure I could do them. So, they were just critically important to me, and I just value them.

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.