I got a call from the Chair of the Search Committee for the President of MIT, which is pretty unusual. I had told my assistant that we didn't take calls from search firms. I was not doing that anymore, taking too much time, too distracting. I was staying put. And just out of the blue, I got a call from the Chair of the Search Committee at MIT and he asked me if I might be interested. And I said, well, frankly, no, I'm not interested. And he said, but hold on a second. Let me tell you a couple of things about MIT. And the first thing he said is that MIT, we consider it to be a meritocracy. And I paused and I think I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it because there weren't many places you could actually talk about meritocracy. And I put the phone back to my ear and he said, then there's something else.

I said, oh, that's interesting. And he said, there's something else that we believe in fervently at MIT, which is we believe in the pursuit of truth. And I'm sure he thought that the phone had just gone dead. Because similarly, I thought that's an amazing thing to be able to say because only a week before I had had a conversation with the Chair of one of our departments in the humanities about his having resigned from a program called Humanities and Science or Humanities in Medicine. And it was one of these activities that get me very excited, bringing different disciplines together, different perspectives together to have some really intense conversations. And that was what the program for the Humanities in Medicine was supposed to be about. And this person was just the kind of person I imagined to be participating. I said, well, why did you drop out? And he said, oh, I just got so tired of being beaten up about truth. Now, deeply, deeply fundamental to my understanding of an individual's purpose in this world is the pursuit of truth. I don't know that we ever will get to truth, but it's important that we contest idea with idea to have a better understanding of the world around us and how we can best interact with those people and that world around us.

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.