Hopi received her B.A. in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley. She completed her Ph.D. in 2000 as a Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington. She then moved to the University of Arizona as a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow where she studied the genetic basis of adaptive melanism in pocket mice. In 2003, she became an Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. Three years later, she moved to Harvard University, where she is the C.Y. Chan Professor of Arts and Sciences and the Xiaomeng Tong and Yu Chen Professor of Life Sciences in the Departments of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology and Molecular & Cellular Biology as well as the Curator of Mammals at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 2023, she became the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences.  She is broadly interested in the genetic basis of adaptation -- from morphology to behavior -- in vertebrates, primarily wild mice.