The executive director of the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST), Susan Hackwood is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Her current research interests include multimedia technologies, distributed asynchronous signal processing, and cellular robot systems. Born in England, she graduated with honors from DeMontfort University in Leicester where she also received her Ph.D. in solid state ionics in 1979. Dr. Hackwood did post-doctoral research in solid state device physics at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hills, New Jersey, and worked on the Bell Labs staff in the field of robotics technology for five years. Joining the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, as a professor of electrical and computer engineering in 1984, she founded and served as co-director of its Center for Robotic Systems in Microelectronics. In 1990, she became founding dean of UCR’s Bourns College of Engineering, a post she held for five years until accepting her position at CCST, a non-profit corporation sponsored by California’s major academic institutions. Dr. Hackwood has been a visiting scholar at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the Sandia National Laboratory in Livermore, California, as well as a visiting associate in engineering at the California Institute of Technology. She currently serves as a member of the president’s cabinet and chair of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She also chairs the Section on Societal Impacts of Science and Engineering of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the AAAS’s Committee on Science Engineering and Public Policy. She is a member of the corporation of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, an independent, not-for-profit research and development enterprise in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A fellow of both the AAAS and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Dr. Hackwood is the recipient of the British Council Award for Ambassador of Science, the Bell Lab Award for Technology Transfer, the National Athena Award, and UCR’s Women Who Made A Difference Award and the Distinguished Service Award of its Center for Environmental Engineering Research among other honors. She has received honorary degrees from her alma mater and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Currently a member of the editorial board of the IEEE’s Spectrum, she formerly served as editor of the Journal of Robotic Systems, a journal she co-founded, associate editor of Manufacturing Review, and as a member of the editorial board of Mechatronics and the editorial advisory board of the International Journal of Environmentally Responsible Manufacturing. She is the author of more than 140 papers published in technical journals and the co-author (with Gerardo Beni and Steve Belinski) of Vacuum Mechatronics, which was published by Artech House in 2001. Dr. Hackwood holds seven patents.