Susan Hackwood is currently Executive Director of the California Council on Science and Technology. CCST is a non-profit corporation sponsored by the key academic institutions in the State.   The Council operates as an independent 30-member assembly of corporate CEOs, academicians, scientists and scholars of the highest distinction.  Modeled after the National Research Council, CCST is a unique State Institution that is governed by a 13 member Board of Directors composed of representatives of the sponsoring academic institutions.

Dr. Hackwood has worked for Bell Laboratories in various capacities, including as Department Head of Device Robotics Technology Research and received the AT&T Bell Laboratories Award for Technology Transfer.  As a professor at University of California at Santa Barbara, she was founder and Co-Director of the Center for Robotic Systems in Microelectronics. Dr. Hackwood was the founding dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside. Her research interests include multimedia technologies, distributed asynchronous signal processing, and cellular robot systems.  In addition to over 100 technical publications and 7 patents, Dr. Hackwood is co-editor and co-founder of the Journal of Robotic Systems. She is an active participant in regional and state economic partnerships.