And as that semester was about to draw to a close, the chair of the department asked me if I'd be interested in a summer job opportunity at the National Institutes of Health. I don't know why me. I said, well, sure. I got that summer job in the lab that became my dissertation lab. Another unusual thing, but it was just, so the lab, this is really important to me, was at the National Institute for Dental Research. It was the Pain Research Laboratory for Dentistry. It's very important how pain is manifest, how we control it. But this pain research group was soup to nuts. There were anatomists and physiologists. We did animal work. We did...and there were clinicians, there were psychologists, there were pharmacologists, clinicians at the clinical center at NIH who were applying the discoveries from the lab on real patients with chronic pain. Chronic pain is a terrible malady.

And all of this was new to me, but the idea of being able to educate yourself, be educated from the fundamentals of what cells in the spinal cord and brain are conveying pain inputs forward along the nervous system. So where could you intervene? Right, you need to know what the path is before, where you can intervene. So that was what we anatomists were doing. And then there were clinicians who were applying these discoveries to treatments for patients. It was for me, absolutely intoxicating, this mix of disciplines. It was wonderful. And my PI, my advisor had never had a graduate student. I was his first. But I was just kind of brought into the mix and it was a wild and exciting mix of interests and talents and expertise. And there was a great library. It was heaven, so I loved it. Great summer.

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.