2015 Richard Lounsbery Lecture
Hopi Hoekstra, recipient of the 2015 Richard Lounsbery Award, presented a lecture entitled "Digging for Genes That Affect Mammalian Behavior" at Smith College on Thursday, October 29, 2015. This lecture was supported by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.
Hoekstra is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and the Curator of Mammals in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on uncovering the genetic basis of morphological and behavioral traits that affect fitness of individuals in the wild. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. In 2013, she was named a Howard Hughes Investigator. She has received Young Investigator awards from the American Society of Naturalists and the Beckman Foundation, and most recently, the Lounsbery Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. She gave the 2013 Commencement speech at UC Berkeley's Integrative Biology Department and has been profiled in The New York Times. Hopi also teaches in Harvard's introductory Life Science course Genetics, Genomics and Evolution to approximately 500 freshmen each year, and has been award the Fannie Cox Prize and a Harvard College Professorship for teaching excellence.
Digging for Genes That Affect Mammalian Behavior
Understanding which genes affect important behaviors, and how they work in the brain, remains a major challenge in biology. To address this goal, we are capitalizing on natural variation in behavior within and between species of deer mice (genus Peromyscus). In this talk, I will focus on an innate behavior – burrowing, an intriguing and complex animal architecture – to explore the genetics and neurobiology of behavioral evolution.
