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President
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
| Appointee | Susan Hockfield |
|---|---|
| Role | President |
| Organisation | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Domain | Academia |
| Start | 5 August 2004 |
| End | 31 December 2012 |
| Notes | First woman president of MIT |
Institutional context
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university founded in 1861. The President is the senior officer. From 1865 through August 2004 every president was male.
Career path
Susan Hockfield (born 1951) earned a BA from the University of Rochester and a PhD in anatomy from Georgetown's School of Medicine. She held faculty positions at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Yale, where she became Provost in 2003 — the second-ranking university officer.
Appointment
The MIT Corporation elected her President effective 5 August 2004. She is the first woman and the first life-scientist to lead MIT.
Tenure
Eight years and four months. Tenure included the establishment of the MIT Energy Initiative, substantial expansion of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the institution's response to the 2008–2009 financial crisis. She left office on 31 December 2012.
Cluster context
Hockfield's 2004 appointment is part of the academic 2001–2007 concentration: Tilghman (Princeton 2001), Simmons (Brown 2001), Hockfield (MIT 2004), Faust (Harvard 2007), preceded by Rodin (Penn 1994). Five Ivy and equivalent first-women across thirteen years. The university record's pattern shape is closer to a single-decade cluster than to the dataset's broader pre-2018 sparse baseline.