I think about one of the most important things that happened to me. Well, first of all, when I was a kid, in retrospect, I realized I was an anatomist. I understood things by taking them apart, and so anything was vulnerable. So I would take flowers apart, seed pods apart, my mother's iron I took apart, her vacuum cleaner, because if I took it apart I could understand how it worked. So I was just obsessed with understanding how things worked, which I'm sure left a trail of dissected objects behind me.

I was not that interested in putting them back. I was just interested in understanding how they worked. And in retrospect, I'm guessing my father kind of followed quietly behind and reassembled the things in our house that got taken apart. And I didn't know, I didn't know this was unusual. I was at a friend's house when I was in probably sixth or seventh grade, we were standing by the front door and they had one of these hydraulic door closers and I was fiddling with it. And she said, "Stop that." I said, "Uh stop what?" She says, "Stop fiddling with that." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "You're always doing that. You always break it and it never gets fixed." I hadn't realized.

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.