The Hoekstra lab capitalizes on natural variation in behavior to study the genetic and circuit-based changes that give rise to ecologically-important differences in innate behavior. Her lab has developed deer mice (genus Peromyscus) as a model system due to their tremendous diversity in heritable behavior, including differences in social, locomotory, vocal, visual and olfactory-related behavior. Her group employs an interdisciplinary approach combining lab-based behavioral assays, genetics, genomics, viral vectors, optogenetics, electrophysiology and field-based experiments. Together, they seek to understand the mechanistic “rules” by which behaviors evolve