Heather Hofmeister , was born in Tulsa Oklahoma (1972) and raised in Houston, Texas. She studied sociology at Rice University in Houston, where she received her B.A. in 1995. Hofmeister earned a Masters degree in Sociology from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 1998, researching late-midlife couples' retirement status, employment history, and marital quality. In 2002, her Ph.D. in Sociology was awarded for her dissertation on the relationships among work structure, family structure, and community structure and the ways these are manifested in the couples’ commute pattern. Hofmeister's graduate work was funded by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Institute on Aging, through the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute and the Cornell Gerontology Research Institute. Both institutes are located within the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center at Cornell University. At the 2002 Business and Professional Women/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Conference featuring research on Families, Workplaces, and Communities, Hofmeister received an award for Best Graduate Student Paper for her work entitled "Dual Earner Couples: Commuting in their Community Context". Research interests and publications focus on Aging and the Life Course, Gender, Sociology of Work and Family, Social Change, Social Stratification and Inequality, Social Institutions, Culture, and Geography. During the 2001-2002 school year, Hofmeister was a visiting professor at Ithaca College, teaching courses on social structure, inequality, and the family. Now a senior research scientist in the Globalife project, she concentrates her work on the U.S. in comparative and life course perspective. In Summer 2003 she became the Deputy Director of the Globalife Project.

Grunow, Daniela, Heather Hofmeister, and Sandra Buchholz. 2005. "Impacts of Family Formation and Education on Women's Employment Across Cohorts in West Germany and the United States". GLOBALIFE Working Paper No. 61, Universitiy of Bamberg, Germany.