Susan Hockfield, president emerita of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been selected as president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She will officially become president-elect at the conclusion of the 182nd annual meeting of the association in Washington this coming February. After one year as president-elect, Dr. Hockfield will become president of the association in 2017.
Dr. Hockfield served as the first woman president of MIT from 2004 to 2012. She remains on the faculty at the university as a professor of neuroscience and as a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
Before assuming the presidency of MIT, Dr. Hockfield was the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology and provost at Yale University. She joined the Yale faculty in 1985 and was named full professor in 1994.
Dr. Hockfield earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Georgetown University School of Medicine. She was an National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at San Francisco in 1979-80, and then joined the scientific staff at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in 1980.