From my first conversation with Jim, when he officially hired me into the lab, he was always around. One of my favorite activities of Jim was to turn up in the lab about nine o'clock at night and these were not planned visits, they were surprise visits. I don't know if he did it to surprise people. I don't know if he was taking a census of who was working late into the night, but I found these to be exciting. My guess now, to put myself in his shoes, the day's full with stuff you have to do, the night is for fun. And the fun is to go from lab to lab and find out what people are working on and to see what they're working on. And so, one of my clearest memories of him showing the lab was, I think a couple years into my being there, maybe it was only a year, and working with Ron [McKay] and Birgit [Zipser].

We had produced all kinds of results and papers and were giving talks. And I was just right, hardly out of postdoc, but really out of graduate school. He had given me the resources to hire a technician. And the deal was, when I arrived, as I understood it, was that I would be supported for a year. At the end of the year, I needed grants to support myself. And so, I was supporting myself on the grants I had gotten, the first grant I had gotten. And so, Jim turns up the lab and he does his Jim thing.

Anyone who knows Jim knows what I mean. And he said, "You need some postdocs.” [It] never occurred to me. And I said, "Okay." He said, "Yep, there's so much work going on. You need some postdocs." And I said, "Well, how would I do that?" And he said, "I'm going to support them for you for the first year." And so, he provided the funding for me to hire two postdocs. I mean, I didn't know it was time for me to get postdocs. I didn't really look around and see that everyone else had postdocs. I mean, it just was doing my work. Stupidly, I should have done more watching how other people were doing it. Game changing.

So, of course, when you do that, you build your lab and then it means that the next time you do your grant cycle, you got to raise the funds to do that. And then he gives you more. And he would also come around the courses. He was not a hands-off manager. It was him. The lab was Jim. It was his life and his purpose. For me, for Jim to imagine the lab, make it happen and create futures for all of us who were there, who few of us had the intelligence to imagine was just an enormous gift. Just fantastic.

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.