About

Dr. Hoekstra is an Assistant Professor specializing in the field of Pediatric Pulmonology. She is a pediatric pulmonologist and global health researcher whose work focuses on developing accessible, non-invasive diagnostic tools to improve respiratory care for children in resource-limited settings.

Dr. Hoekstra’s global health career spans Malawi, South Africa, and Bangladesh. As an NIH Fogarty Global Health Fellow, she lived and worked in Malawi, where she led a study on the risk and impact of aspiration in infants hospitalized with pneumonia—work that continues to shape her ongoing pediatric aspiration research, which she is now building upon in the United States. She is also helping to develop and evaluate an AI-enabled digital stethoscope for pediatric lung sound analysis, serving as a Co-Investigator on two NIH-funded studies led by her mentor, Dr. Eric McCollum—the BLAAAST study in Bangladesh and the Xilonga study in South Africa. Building on the BLAAAST study, she recently received a Thrasher Research Fund Early Career Award to lead an implementation science project to co-design strategies for using an AI-enabled digital stethoscope in rural Bangladesh. She is also a Co-Investigator for Dr. McCollum’s NIH-funded BiLDing-ACTION study, which evaluates antenatal corticosteroids on the lung function of premature children in Bangladesh.

Her recent scholarship includes first-author publications on implementing pediatric tracheostomy guidelines in low- and middle-income countries (American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 2025) and the performance of an AI algorithm for interpreting pediatric lung sounds in Malawi (Journal of Global Health, 2025), as well as a systematic review and meta-analysis on hypoxemia and mortality in children with lower respiratory infections in LMICs (in press, Lancet Global Health, 2026).