There were several themes that came out. The first, an enormous call for MIT to do more in engineering, the energy future, designing an energy future and the technology for an energy future. Everybody kept saying, we have all this stuff to do it. Why aren't we doing more of it?

So an outpouring of enthusiasm, enthusiasm, a feeling of almost certainly responsibility for MIT to play a larger role in changing the energy equation. That was one, the other surprised me. I was talking to, it first came up in my, when you do this, you start with the deans and you do the department heads. You talk to people in an orderly way. And then I always talk to people in a disorderly way of just walking around campus and talking to people I've passed. But when I met with the Dean of Engineering, Dean Tom Magnanti, he told me something that just, I mean, I just about fell off my chair. He said that something like a quarter of the faculty in the School of Engineering were using biological parts in their work. And I said, what does that mean? And he described me this incredible, a new age of biology.

We are now beyond molecular biology. Molecular biology has given us is access to biological tools to do technical work. It's so exciting. Well, I wrote a book about it. It's so exciting. So that was, and then when I was talking to people as I walked around, it's a theme that came up again and again, the opportunities at the convergence, what I call the convergence of biology with engineering. Biology produces tools now. They're not screws, they're not hammers, they're biological parts. Absolutely fantastic. So that was another theme. A third theme that came up that kind of surprised me because I viewed MIT as such a cohesive place. I mean, people are, even though they're in different disciplines, seem to be oriented around the same kind of worldview. But I heard so often people feeling like they weren't connected. This sense of disenfranchisement and that just really hurt my heart because here's a place where, oh my gosh, everyone should feel they're part of the team and they didn't. And so those were the things that really came out of 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.