Draft:Kristin Hook

• Comment: Generally speaking, we tend not to have biographies of candidates for election at this level. After election they may well have presumed notability, and thus open to an article. The policy is WP:NPOL. So in that case the usual wp:GOLDENRULE applies where we would be needing 3 lots of significant independent coverage of the individual, and not just in respect of this election. ChrysGalley (talk) 17:46, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

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Kristin Hook (born March 21, 1984) is an American biologist, science communicator, and policy advocate. Her research has focused on animal behavior, sexual selection, and the evolution of reproductive traits, and she developed a machine learning method to study the relationship between form and function in cells with complex behaviors. She has held science policy fellowships in the U.S. Senate and at the National Institutes of Health, and worked as a biological scientist at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Through her work with 500 Women Scientists and her public writing, she has become an advocate for science-informed federal policy and for public access to science.

Education

Hook earned a B.A. in Plan II Honors and a B.S. in Biology, with a concentration in ecology, evolution, and behavior, from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. She went on to earn a PhD in animal behavior from Cornell University in 2016, where her dissertation research focused on sexual selection and the evolution of reproductive traits in an agricultural pest species.

Career

After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, Hook joined Teach For America and taught middle school science for three years in Brooklyn, New York. Following her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park, supported by a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology. Her research there examined the evolution and behavior of sperm cells, and she developed a machine learning method to understand how form and function relate in cells with complex behaviors across animal species. Her work also addressed longstanding assumptions about females as passive participants in mating and reproduction.

From 2020 to 2021, Hook served as an AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow, sponsored by the American Statistical Association, in the U.S. Senate office of Elizabeth Warren, where she worked as an oversight investigator. From 2021 to 2022, she was an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Executive Branch Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, focusing on federal health policy related to the ethical use of artificial intelligence in biomedical research and access to health care. From 2022 to 2023, she worked as a biological scientist in the U.S. Government Accountability Office, where she also served as an elected union leader for the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 1921.

Science Communication and Advocacy

Hook co-founded and co-led the Washington, D.C. chapter of 500 Women Scientists, a nonprofit organization advocating for science-informed federal policy and mentoring young women and girls in science. As a graduate student at Cornell, she helped organize ComSciCon-Cornell, a workshop on science communication. She has described science as a public good and has written that restricted access to publicly funded research is a form of social injustice.

Hook has written on the intersection of science and public policy for several newspapers. In 2019, a social media thread she wrote on immigration policy led to an invited op-ed in the Houston Chronicle titled "How to think like a scientist about the border wall." She has also published op-eds in the San Antonio Express-News, on funding scientific research to control agricultural threats such as screwworm outbreaks, and in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, on civic engagement. Her research and commentary have been featured by news outlets including NPR, the BBC, STAT, and Slate.

Awards

Hook received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2011 and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology in 2017. In 2020 and 2021, she was awarded AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowships in the legislative and executive branches, respectively.

Politics

In 2024, Hook was the Democratic nominee for Texas's 21st Congressional District, challenging Republican incumbent Chip Roy. On March 3, 2026, she won the Democratic primary and will be on the ballot again in the November general election in the race to represent Texas' 21st Congressional District.

Selected Publications

• Hook, Kristin A.; Weber, William D.; Fisher, Heidi S. (2022). "Postcopulatory sexual selection is associated with sperm aggregate quality in Peromyscus mice". Behavioral Ecology. 33 (1): 55–64. doi:10.1093/beheco/arab109.
• Hook, Kristin A.; Wilke, Lauren M.; Fisher, Heidi S. (2021). "Apical sperm hook morphology is linked to sperm swimming performance and sperm aggregation in Peromyscus mice". Cells. 10 (9): 2279. doi:10.3390/cells10092279.
• Hook, Kristin A.; Yang, Qixin; Campanello, Leonard; Losert, Wolfgang; Fisher, Heidi S. (2021). "The social shape of sperm: using an integrative machine-learning approach to examine sperm ultrastructure and collective motility". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 288 (1959): 20211553. doi:10.1098/rspb.2021.1553.
• Hook, Kristin A.; Fisher, Heidi S. (2020). "Methodological considerations for examining the relationship between sperm morphology and motility". Molecular Reproduction and Development. 87 (6): 633–649. doi:10.1002/mrd.23346.
• Orr, Teri J.; Burns, Mercedes; Hawkes, Kristen; Holekamp, Kay E.; Hook, Kristin A.; Josefson, Chloe C.; et al. (2020). "It takes two to tango: including a female perspective in reproductive biology". Integrative and Comparative Biology. 60 (3): 796–813. doi:10.1093/icb/icaa084.
• Pearce, Daniel J. G.; Hoogerbrugge, Luuk A.; Hook, Kristin A.; Fisher, Heidi S.; Giomi, Luca (2018). "Cellular geometry controls the efficiency of motile sperm aggregates". Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 15 (148): 20180702. doi:10.1098/rsif.2018.0702..
• Fisher, Heidi S.; Hook, Kristin A.; Weber, William D.; Hoekstra, Hopi E. (2018). "Sibling rivalry: males with more brothers develop larger testes". Ecology and Evolution. 8 (16): 8197–8203. doi:10.1002/ece3.4337.
• Hook, Kristin A. (2018). "No support for the sexy-sperm hypothesis in the seed beetle: sons of monandrous females fare better in post-copulatory competition". Ecology and Evolution. 8 (23): 11742–11753. doi:10.1002/ece3.4626.
• Hook, Kristin A. (2017). "Female remating decisions and a shorter inter-mating interval diminish last-male sperm precedence". Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. 71 (8): 121. doi:10.1007/s00265-017-2350-0.
• Egan, Andrea L.; Hook, Kristin A.; Reeve, H. Kern; Iyengar, Vikram K. (2016). "Polyandrous females provide sons with more competitive sperm: support for the sexy-sperm hypothesis in the rattlebox moth (Utetheisa ornatrix)". Evolution. 70 (1): 72–81. doi:10.1111/evo.12829.

Personal Life

Hook was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. She identifies as Latina and is of Mexican American descent. From 2019 to 2022, she volunteered with the Young Center for Unaccompanied Immigrant Children.