Kristin Hook Ph.D. ’16 is challenging Chip Roy (R-T.X.) for his house seat in Texas’s 21st congressional district during this fall’s elections. The district contains several Austin neighborhoods and surrounding areas in Central Texas.
Hook will face tough odds running as a Democrat in a House district that has not voted for a Democratic representative since 1976, when Robert Krueger (D-T.X.) was reelected to his House seat. In 2022, Roy defeated his Democratic challenger, Claudia Zapata, by a margin greater than 25 percent.
At Cornell, Hook completed her Ph.D. in animal science and conducted field research on sexual selection, an evolutionary mechanism for choosing mates. Hook then served as a science and technology expert in the U.S. Senate under Elizabeth Warren (D – M.A.), the National Institutes of Health and later the Government Accountability Office, a job she left in accordance with the Hatch Act to run for the House.
As a scientist, Hook worried that people in power have been overlooking empirical evidence for personal gain.
“There’s a lot of money to be made from misinformation that’s spread, and a lot of people like to cherry-pick their information,” Hook said. “Unfortunately, politicians are no different, especially when the science goes directly against the interests of their donors.”
One example Hook noted was Texas Senate Bill 8 — a state law from 2021 known as the Texas Heartbeat Act — which banned abortion after electrical cardiac activity in an embryo can be detected by an ultrasound, which typically occurs after about six weeks of pregnancy.
However, experts dispute whether this electrical cardiac activity constitutes a heartbeat, especially since the heart develops later in a pregnancy.
Abortions are now banned at all stages of pregnancy in Texas, with exceptions only for cases where the life of the mother is at risk.
“Think about the heartbeat bill here in Texas, there is no heartbeat at the five- or six-week mark,” Hook said. “That’s just a flat-out misinformed title for a bill that’s going to make people sympathetic to thinking about the fact that this is a fetus that will eventually develop into a baby.”
Another area in which Hook wants to enact change is education. Hook, a graduate of Texas public schools, criticized the underfunding of the Texas education system, saying that it is a deliberate attempt to keep voters in the dark about important political issues and deprive them of the full ability to make informed decisions.
“Part of the problem with the lack of critical thinking is the underfunding of education,” Hook said. “There’s been a coordinated effort to undermine the education of the voters, and that’s led to a lack of critical thinking skills.”
Hook said a lot of the skills that she learned during her time at Cornell were instrumental in her ability to run her own campaign as a first-time candidate.
“I had to figure out what I wanted to study, apply for funding to get there. I did field work in England for multiple summers. I ran my own lab, acquired my own undergraduates to help me and balanced my budget. I published my own papers,” Hook said. “It was a lot of starting everything from scratch.”