Stephen Hsu

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Stephen Hsu
Hsu in 2015
Born	Stephen Dao Hui Hsu 1966 (age 57–58) Ames, Iowa, U.S.
Alma mater	California Institute of Technology University of California, Berkeley
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Harvard University Yale University University of Oregon Michigan State University
Thesis	Topics in particle physics and cosmology (1991)

Stephen Dao Hui Hsu (born 1966) is an American physicist, who has previously worked as a tech executive and a university administrator.

Early life and education

Hsu was born and raised in Ames, Iowa.^[1] His father Cheng Ting Hsu (1923–1996), who was born in Wenling, Zhejiang, in what was then the Republic of China, was a professor of aerospace engineering at Iowa State University in Ames from 1958 to 1989.^[2] Stephen Hsu's mother was also originally from China, and Hsu had a grandfather who served as a general in the National Revolutionary Army of the Chinese Kuomintang government.^[1] At age 12, Hsu took his first college course, in computer science, and he took physics and mathematics courses at Iowa State while attending Ames High School.^[3][4][5]

Hsu received a B.S. from the

In July 2012, Michigan State University named him vice president for research and graduate studies. At the time, Inside Higher Ed and Lansing State Journal described the appointment as controversial, due to Hsu's comments endorsing research into using genetic modification to increase human intelligence, and his blog posts describing human race categorization as biologically valid.^[12][13]

On June 10, 2020, the MSU graduate student union began calling for Hsu to be removed from the administrative position. The MSU student association also called for his removal, and multiple petitions were circulated, including a counter-petition.^[14][15] As of June 17, petitions for removal had 700 and 470 signatures, while the counter petition had over 970 signatures.^[16] On June 19, 2020 MSU president Samuel L. Stanley announced that Hsu had resigned as vice president, returning to a tenured faculty position.^[16][14] Hsu made it clear that it was Stanley who requested his resignation, and that he did not agree with Stanley's decision.^[17]

Technology work

In 2000, Hsu went on leave from the University of Oregon to create Safeweb, an

Hsu is a founder of Genomic Prediction, a company that develops technology for advanced genetic testing.^[20][21]

Hsu also has an interest in psychometrics^[22] and human genetic variation, which he writes about in his blog and in other publications.^{[23][24][25][26]}

In 2017, Hsu and five collaborators published a paper in Genetics on the use of lasso to construct genomic predictors of complex human traits (height, bone density, cognitive ability), using data from the UK Biobank. Their genotype height predictor estimated adult height within an accuracy of roughly one inch.^[27]

In 2018 his research group used the method on the same dataset to build genomic predictors for complex diseases such as