Hopkins received her BA from Radcliffe College in 1964,[1] and earned her PhD from the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Harvard University in 1971,[4] where she worked with Professor Mark Ptashne.

She identified viral genes that determine host range and the type and severity of cancers mouse retroviruses cause, including importantly the capsid protein p30 and transcriptional elements that came to be known as enhancers.

With her postdoctoral fellow Shuo Lin, graduate students Adam Amsterdam and Nick Gaiano, and others in her lab she developed an efficient method for large-scale insertional mutagenesis in the fish.

Using this technique her lab carried out a large genetic screen that identified and cloned 25% of the genes that are essential for a fertilized egg to develop into a free-swimming zebrafish larva.

Hopkins believed that insertional mutagenesis, which had been very successfully employed in invertebrate model organisms (D. melanogaster and C. elegans), would provide a valuable alternative or adjunct to the chemical screens.

[3][5] Due to her complaints to the administration, a committee was formed (with Hopkins as the initial chair) to investigate the issue of inequalities experienced by women faculty as a result of unconscious gender bias.

[6] The results were bold but contentious: A summary of the committee's findings, published in 1999[7] and endorsed by then-MIT president Charles Vest and then-Dean Robert Birgeneau, is credited with launching a national re-examination of equity for women scientists.