Hopi Hoekstra

Hopi Hoekstra is an evolutionary biologist working at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her lab uses natural populations of rodents to study the genetic basis of adaptation – from morphology to behavior. She is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. She is also the Curator of Mammals at the Museum of Comparative Zoology and a Harvard College Professor. In 2014 Hoekstra became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. In 2016 Hoekstra was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Early life

Hopi Hoekstra's parents were born in the Netherlands, before moving to the United States. Hoekstra's first name "Hopi" is derived from a Dutch term of endearment. Hoekstra attended a high-school near Palo Alto, in California. She chose to attend college at the University of California, Berkeley, where she initially intended to study political science. She chose the university because she wanted to play Pac-10 volleyball, which she did for two years. She has stated that at one point she wanted to become the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, but she was drawn into biology by a class on biomechanics taught by Robert J. Full. She went on to work in Full's lab, studying cockroach locomotion. However, she later stated that she had a passion for fieldwork and for mice even at that point.

Career

Hopi Hoekstra received her B.A. in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley. Before her graduate studies, she worked on grizzly bears for a year in Yellowstone National Park. She obtained her Ph.D. in Zoology as a Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle. For her postdoctoral work, she studied the genetic basis of adaptive melanism in pocket mice at the University of Arizona. In 2003, she became an Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. Three years later she moved to Harvard University, where she was promoted to full professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology in 2010.

Research

In 2013, Hoekstra published an article in the journal Nature on the genetics of burrowing behavior in the oldfield mouse, or Peromyscus polionotus. Working with graduate students in her lab, Hoekstra managed to identify sections of DNA which control the length of the tunnels dug by the mice. Other scientists praised the study as "an elegant and inventive piece of research." The study is unusual for dealing with a highly complex natural behavior.

Hoekstra is currently trying to narrow down the specific genes or loci that control tunneling behavior in mice. Students in her lab are also studying the connections between digging behavior and the neurobiology of reward behaviors in mouse brains.

She has also previously studied the evolution of the color of mice coats, and its significance for adaptation. In 2013 her team published a paper in the journal Science, describing how coat color in mice was controlled by nine separate mutations within a single gene, named "agouti." Speaking about this discovery, Hoekstra said "The question has always been whether evolution is dominated by these big leaps or smaller steps. When we first implicated the agouti gene, we could have stopped there and concluded that evolution takes these big steps as only one major gene was involved, but that would have been wrong. When we looked more closely, within this gene, we found that even within this single locus, there are, in fact, many small steps." Her work supports the hypothesis that Evolution can occur through incremental changes.

Honors and Awards

• 2016 Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
• 2015 Richard Lounsbery Award, National Academy of Sciences.
• 2013 Commencement Speaker, Department of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley
• 2006 Young Investigator Award, Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation
• 2003 Young Investigator Prize, American Society of Naturalists
• 1998 Ernst Mayr Award, Society of Systematic Biologists
• 1995-2000 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellowship
• 1994 Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society, University of California, Berkeley

Family

Hoekstra lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her son and her husband, James Mallet. Mallet is also an evolutionary biologist at Harvard.

Selected publications

• Linnen, C.R., Y.-P. Poh, B.K. Peterson, R.D.H. Barrett, J.G Larson, J. Jensen, and H.E. Hoekstra. 2013. Adaptive evolution of multiple traits through multiple mutations at a single gene. Science 339:1312-1316.
• Weber, J.N., B.K. Peterson and H.E. Hoekstra. 2013. Discrete genetic modules are responsible for the evolution of complex burrowing behaviour in deer mice. Nature 493:4202-405.
• Manceau, M., V.S. Domingues, R. Mallarino and H.E. Hoekstra. 2011. The developmental role of Agouti in color pattern evolution. Science 331:1062-1065.
• Fisher, H.S. and H.E. Hoekstra. 2010. Competition drives cooperation among closely-related sperm of deer mice. Nature 463:801-803.
• Linnen, C.R., E.P. Kingsley, J.D. Jensen and H.E. Hoekstra. 2009. On the origin and spread of an adaptive allele in deer mice. Science 325:1095-1098.
• Nachman, M.W., H.E. Hoekstra and S. L. D’Agostino. 2003. The genetic basis of adaptive melanism in pocket mice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 100:5268-5273.