Susan Hockfield, the 16th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has announced that she will step down as president once a successor is found. Dr. Hockfield has served as president of MIT since 2004 and is the first woman to hold the position. She will remain on the faculty at MIT after leaving the presidency as professor of neuroscience in the department of brain and cognitive sciences.
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.
You can read President Hockfield’s statement to the MIT community here.