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.
[1][2] She has served on the advisory board of several foundations (e.g. Searle Scholars Program, Max Plank Society), magazines (Scientific American, Quanta) and journals (PNAS, Current Biology, PLoS Genetics, Development, bioRxiv).
In June 2023, she was named as the Dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, succeeding Claudine Gay, who had assumed the University's presidency a month prior.
Hoekstra spent her scientific career working to understand the fundamental processes by which organisms, including humans, differ in the natural world.
[14] 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.
[14][2] 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.
[2] She was among the first to identify a specific DNA mutation and directly link it to fitness in the wild, a result found in many modern textbooks.
In 2013, her team published an article in the journal Science, describing how coat color in mice was controlled by nine separate mutations within a single gene, named "agouti.
[16] More specifically, the study showed how a sequence variant in the Agouti gene changes the phenotype and then linked those changes to changes in population allele frequency, demonstrating evolution of trait by natural selection.