MIT is very interested in setting goals and understanding what those goals should be. But one of the things that many people at MIT do, many faculty, many students, is start companies. We are a real innovation engine. And part of it is coming up with a great discovery here and another part of it is getting it off campus to start a company. My colleague Phil Sharp, the Nobel Prize winning Phil Sharp, whom I adore and respect enormously, I share an office suite with him, has a wonderful saying: he says, "technology travels on two feet." Meaning that being across the street from a bunch of companies is really great for MIT. In any case, we decided to do an analysis of the rate at which companies are founded by women and male faculty and it was one of the biggest shocks to me. I had kind of guessed it, but the numbers were just horrible.

And the one way to distill it, we analyzed, I think five departments in the school of engineering, school of science with the greatest number of spin out, greatest number of patents in very deep detail. This is tough analytics. Thank you, Nancy Hopkins, who really is all on top of the how you get data that work correctly representing what's happening and allow you to do things with it. But among those five departments, if we look at the rate of company founding over, I've forgotten whether there was a five- or seven-year period. If women were founding companies at the same rate as men, there would've been 40 more companies. And I see that, I think, oh my gosh, squandered assets. Women who are every bit as qualified as their male peers aren't doing it and so we started the Future Founders Initiative to see if we can begin to change the game. Our analysis, it's hard to know exactly what doesn't work for women. I describe it as network effects, so it's that you have a result and you're talking to your buddy about it and your buddy says, oh, you should start a company. You say, well, how would I do that?

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.