Susan Hockfield

Susan Hockfield 2012

Susan Hockfield (born March 24, 1951 in Chicago , Illinois ) is an American neuroscientist and university professor .

Life

Hockfield is the daughter of a lawyer and executive at General Electric. The family moved across the United States with him and she grew up in Illinois, New York, Connecticut, and Texas. Hockfield graduated from the University of Rochester with a bachelor's degree in biology in 1973. She was then studying cell biology and electron microscopy and was an electron microscope technician in a laboratory at Georgetown University (School of Medicine), where she was pursuing a graduate program in anatomy, specifically in neuroscience, where she did most of the work for her Ph.D. at the National Institutes of Health with Steven Gobel and received his PhD in 1979. She published on mechanisms of pain and memory for sensory perception. She was a post-doctoral student at the University of California, San Francisco . From 1980 she worked as an employed researcher at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory , where she had brought James Watson . She also kept in touch with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory when she moved to Yale University in 1985 , where she became Director of Graduate Studies in Neurobiology before she even got tenure . In 1994 she became full professor of neurobiology there and in 2001 she became William T. Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology. At the time, she was concerned with cell development in the brain and was a pioneer in the use of monoclonal antibodies in research on the brain. She discovered proteins that cause structural changes in early childhood brain development.

She also examined the brain's glial cell system and discovered a gene and associated protein that was responsible for the motility of cancer cells in gliomas . This opened up new starting points for combating this cancer.

In 1998 she became dean of Yale's Graduate School of Art and Sciences and oversaw 70 graduate programs. She then became Provost of Yale, the university's second highest administrative post alongside the President.

From 2004 to 2012 she was the full-time president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . She brought a new focus at the intersection of engineering and biology, renewed the undergraduate curriculum and oversaw several expansion projects of the campus. She initiated the MIT Energy Initiative, a massive $ 300 million research program focused on renewable energies. She was also a professor of neuroscience at MIT. Since 2012, Hockfield has returned to her scientific career.

In 2004 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , a trustee of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution , on the board of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and a director of the General Electric Company, her father's old company. In 2010 she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy .

In 1991 she married the doctor Thomas N. Byrne and has a daughter with him.

Web links

• Biography at MIT

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography, Academy of Achievement ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/hockfield-0216.html
3. ^ Members: Susan Hockfield. Royal Irish Academy, accessed May 7, 2019 .