In her inaugural address, Hockfield called for MIT to cultivate the convergence of engineering and the life sciences to develop new approaches to address global challenges. Toward that end, she led, among other efforts, the establishment of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard University. 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. She catalyzed the development of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, Massachusetts, an unprecedented collaboration of 5 universities, 2 private companies, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to provide state-of-the art computation tools for research advances.