Hopi Hoekstra

Danielle "Hopi" Elizabeth Hoekstra (born 1972) 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, and in 2017 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Hopi Hoekstra was born to a family of Dutch ancestry. 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 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.

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. She is a member of the Editorial Board for Current Biology.

Hoekstra is best known for her “elegant and inventive research” studying the genetic mechanisms that influence the evolution of highly complex natural behaviors. In 2013, Hoekstra published an article in the journal Nature on the genetics of burrowing behavior in two sister species of Peromyscus mice;the oldfield mouse (P. polionotus), which builds elaborate burrows complete with an escape tunnel, and the deer mouse (P. maniculatis), which builds a simple and shallow nest. The study is unusual for dealing with a highly complex natural behavior. Using a combination of behavioral assays and classical genetic strategies, Hoekstra and her students identified four regions of DNA, which control the length of the tunnels dug by the mice. With these sections of DNA in mind, Hoekstra is currently trying to narrow down the specific genes that control tunneling behavior in mice. Students in her lab are also studying the connections between digging behavior and the neurobiology of reward.

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.

• 2018Elected to the American Philosophical Society
• 2017Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2016Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
• 2015Richard Lounsbery Award, National Academy of Sciences.
• 2006Beckman Young Investigator Award, Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation
• 2003Jasper J. Loftus-Hills Young Investigator Prize, American Society of Naturalists
• 1998Ernst Mayr Award, Society of Systematic Biologists

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

• Linnen, C.R.; Poh, Y.-P.; Peterson, B.K.; Barrett, R.D.H.; Larson, J.G; Jensen, J.; Hoekstra, H.E. (2013). "Adaptive evolution of multiple traits through multiple mutations at a single gene". Science. 339: 1312–1316. doi:10.1126/science.1233213. PMC 3836219. PMID 23493712.
• Weber, J.N.; Peterson, B.K.; Hoekstra, H.E. (2013). "Discrete genetic modules are responsible for the evolution of complex burrowing behaviour in deer mice". Nature. 493: 4202–405.
• Fisher, H.S.; Hoekstra, H.E. (2010). "Competition drives cooperation among closely-related sperm of deer mice". Nature. 463: 801–803. doi:10.1038/nature08736. PMC 2824558. PMID 20090679.
• Hoekstra, Hopi E.; Hirschmann, Rachel J.; Bundey, Richard A.; Insel, Paul A.; Crossland, Janet P. (2006). "A single amino acid mutation contributes to adaptive beach mouse color pattern". Science. 313 (5783): 101–104. doi:10.1126/science.1126121. PMID 16825572.
• Nachman, M.W.; Hoekstra, H.E.; D'Agostino, S. L. (2003). "The genetic basis of adaptive melanism in pocket mice" (PDF). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 100: 5268–5273. doi:10.1073/pnas.0431157100. PMC 154334. PMID 12704245.