Nancy Hopkins

Early life and education Nancy Doe Hopkins was born in 1943 in New York City. Hopkins had many relatives involved in the fields of engineering and science.

Hopkins received her BA from Radcliffe College in 1964, where she worked with Professor Mark Ptashne. With Ptashne she identified the operator sites on DNA to which the lambda repressor binds to control early gene expression and hence the viral life cycle. As a postdoctoral fellow of Nobel Laureate James D. Watson and Robert Pollack at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab she worked on DNA tumor viruses and cell biology, discovering that cells whose nucleus had been removed were able to re-establish normal morphology.

Career and research She joined the MIT faculty in the Center for Cancer Research in 1973 In July 1994, together with 15 other women faculty in the School of Science at MIT, Hopkins drafted and co-signed a letter to the then-Dean of Science (now Chancellor of Berkeley) Robert Birgeneau, stating their evidence regarding gender discrimination. An ad-hoc committee was formed (with Hopkins as the initial chair) to investigate the issue of inequalities experienced by women faculty as a result of unconscious gender bias.

A summary of the committee's findings, published in 1999 and endorsed by then-MIT president Charles Vest and then-dean Robert Birgeneau, is credited with launching a national re-examination of equity for women scientists. While some questioned the rigor of the analysis performed by the MIT committee, MIT's efforts are considered by many to be a laudable example of self-monitoring by an institute of higher education.

The study also led to 9 research universities, including MIT, forming an ongoing collaboration to study and address issues of gender equity. The group includes Harvard University, Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Yale University, and University of California, Berkeley, in addition to MIT. Hopkins involved many experts, who were researching the status of women and minorities among faculty, in these collaborations. At the MIT-9 meetings, Donna Nelson presented the Nelson Diversity Surveys to compare the representation of women among faculty at these individual universities versus the national data.

In 2020, Hopkins appeared in the Tribeca Film Festival in the film "Picture a Scientist", presenting the MIT study.

Harassment incident by Francis Crick

Hopkins stated that when she was an undergraduate in the 1960s, Francis Crick put his hands on her breasts during a lab visit. She described the incident: "Before I could rise and shake hands, he had zoomed across the room, stood behind me, put his hands on my breasts and said, 'What are you working on?'"

Walk-out protest of comments by then-Harvard-President Larry Summers

In January 2005, at an NBER meeting in Cambridge, MA on the topic of how to address the under-representation of women and minorities in science and engineering fields, Hopkins caused controversy by walking out in protest during a talk by then President of Harvard Lawrence Summers when he speculated that one reason for the very small number of high-achieving women in science and engineering fields might be “intrinsic aptitude” (specifically that the bell-curve of aptitude is flatter for men than women). Her action became public when she replied to an e-mail from Boston Globe reporter Marcella Bombardieri inquiring about Summers’ speech. Bombardieri's report of Summers’ speech set off a national discussion of gender discrimination, and academic freedom, and contributed to Summers’ resignation as the President of Harvard.

Honors and Awards Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998) Margaret L. Kripke Legend Award, MD Anderson Cancer Center (2012) Harvard Centennial Medal, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2014) Honorary Doctorate, Trinity College Dublin (2014) Alice C. Evans Award, American Society for Microbiology (2015) Helen Dean King Award, The Wistar Institute (2017) Honorary Doctorate, Rockefeller University (2019) Public Welfare Medal, National Academy of Sciences (2024) STATUS List, STAT (2025)

Personal life Hopkins has been married to J. Dinsmore Adams Jr. (known as Dinny) since 2007.