Learning of this shocking disparity and pile of squandered assets that is women's possible inventions that aren't happening. We designed a program to try and catch women up and we, being my colleagues, Nancy Hopkins, Sangeeta Bhatia and Kit Hickey, to try to bridge some of the gaps. The gaps are hard to know because we're women, so we don't know what's missing. But we do know what's missing is that just when you're having lunch, when you're hanging out with your friend, you're describing some research results and your friend says, well, you should start a company with that. And you say, well, how would I do that? And your friend says, oh, I'll introduce you to my funders. I'll introduce you to this person I'll introduce you, because they know who's in the network. They know people in the network and somehow that happens in ways that don't generally include women.

If there's been an analysis done of most productive labs in terms of patenting and company foundation, and those labs tend to have more men trainees than women, so there are all kinds of places we could intervene, but we thought we'd just start at the end point and create a program that provides the infrastructure, the network, essentially for women so that they can bring their ideas forward. We're in the second round, it's brand new. It's called the Future Founders Initiative and our Future Founders Program. And we, once every two years, make a call for proposals and people send their proposed, women, send their proposals for the companies they're ready to found. We have a group of experienced entrepreneurs who are the reviewers and we select a subset of them. We have our first set in phase two and selecting our second set right now. But we provide education, we provide mentorship, we provide all the connectivity that they don't normally have, and of the nine women who were selected in the first round, eight are continuing on to actually develop their companies. So far so good. They haven't gotten to the fundraising part yet, but that'll happen.

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.