She is also a director of Break Through Cancer, Cajal Neuroscience, Fidelity Non-Profit Management Foundation, Lasker Foundation, Mass General Brigham, Pfizer, Repertoire Immune Medicines, and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research; a lifetime member of the MIT Corporation; and a board member of the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Before returning to MIT following her presidency, Hockfield held the Marie Curie Visiting Professorship at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

[1] Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, Hockfield joined the staff of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1980.

Support for graduate students also expanded in many dimensions, including healthcare, career counseling, fellowships, and opportunities to interact with faculty.

During her time as dean and as provost, Hockfield was at the center of an imbroglio surrounding the Graduate Employees and Students Organization and its unionization efforts.

[4] She encouraged work that crossed disciplines, departments, and schools within MIT and that fostered collaborations among the Boston region's academic medical centers and educational institutions.

During her presidency, she served as the inaugural co-chair of the White House-led Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), a task force of government, industry, and academic leaders.

In an August 2011 New York Times op-ed, Hockfield wrote, “To make our economy grow, sell more goods to the world and replenish the work force, we need to restore manufacturing — not the assembly-line jobs of the past, but the high-tech advanced manufacturing of the future.”[6] During Hockfield's presidency, representation of underrepresented minorities and women increased across the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty populations.

To address the growing interest in attending MIT (applications more than doubled during her tenure), Hockfield initiated an expansion of the undergraduate population.

EdX, Hockfield said, “represents a unique opportunity to improve education on our own campuses through online learning, while simultaneously creating a bold new educational path for millions of learners worldwide.”[7] Hockfield pioneered the use of monoclonal antibody technology in brain research and discovered a gene that plays a critical role in the spread of cancer in the brain.