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Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra discussed her own evolution as a biologist — from dissecting owl pellets as a child to running a lab at Harvard — during morning prayers delivered in Memorial Church Tuesday morning.

“As a child, I was lucky that my mom actively nurtured my natural curiosity. Though she often says that she has no idea how I became a biologist, I think back to my childhood, and the answer is so clear,” Hoekstra said in her remarks, which headlined Memorial Church’s morning prayers service.

Hoekstra fondly recalled finding owl pellets, which are birds’ regurgitated food, near her home as a child and arranging the mouse bones she uncovered into little mouse skeletons.

The experience was “perfect training” for her future career conducting pioneering research on deer mice, she said.

“It is this spirit of persistence and curiosity that propels us forward, guiding us towards new horizons with knowledge and understanding,” Hoekstra said to the roughly two dozen attendees, who listened to the FAS dean attentively and later joined in prayer in the Appleton Chapel.

The world of scientific research that Hoekstra described fondly in her remarks has experienced no such reverent calm in recent weeks. As the Trump administration uses federal research funding as leverage in his pressure campaign against universities, Harvard has braced for losses and researchers have scrambled to find new ways to fund their work.

Hoekstra has addressed the threats to research funding in previous remarks, warning faculty at a meeting this month that she expected “significant financial challenges,” and authorized guidance urging the FAS to keep spending flat in fiscal year 2026.

But on Tuesday, she was more interested in reflecting on her own experiences of scientific curiosity and her sense of wonder in the natural world.

“My family didn’t have a lot of resources. In the summers, my mom, a teacher, would find creative and inexpensive ways to entertain my brother and me — usually outside,” said Hoekstra, whose father was an engineer.

Hoekstra discussed how the same persistence that “our inner child scientist possesses in droves” also motivated Darwin — who advanced his theory of evolution in his magnum opus, “On The Origin of Species,” more than 20 years after his famous research exhibition to the Galapagos Islands.

“The path to groundbreaking discoveries is a long one, littered with countless hypotheses and approaches that just didn’t work out,” Hoekstra said. “I know this from experience: a lot, in fact most experiments fail and theories crumble in the face of new evidence.”

But, she added, scientists often make their greatest strides forward amid disappointment and uncertainty.

“It is precisely in these moments of uncertainty that opportunity arises — the opportunity to learn, to adapt, and to grow. And then sometimes we stumble upon that serendipitous discovery that fundamentally changes everything,” Hoekstra said.

“This is the natural path of curiosity and wonder, of discovery and innovation,” she added. “And it never stops feeling magical.”

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.