Patrick Hsu

I’m a scientist, founder, and investor. I work with ambitious people to improve the human experience in our lifetimes.
I was born in Taipei and raised on the west coasts of Canada and the United States. I completed my master’s and PhD at Harvard University and was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley.
I co-founded and help to lead the Arc Institute, teach as a UC Berkeley professor, helped to start Fast Grants to pioneer a better model for rapid science funding, and advised an effort to test 300 California foods for plastic chemicals.
Before I ever touched a pipette, I studied Middle English textual criticism and computer science, and was homeschooled until college.

I am a researcher working at the interface of biology, technology development, and machine learning.
Learn more about our lab on our Arc and Berkeley pages. Here’s a longer list of my publications, patents, and asteroid.
Our contributions or inventions include the discovery of the first programmable recombinases, the Evo and Evo 2 AI foundation models trained on genomes, the State virtual cell model, the most widely used tools for CRISPR-based RNA targeting, and foundational studies of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing in human cells.
I have co-founded multiple biotechnology and therapeutics companies, such as Stylus Medicine and Terrain Biosciences, and was on the initial team at the first Cas9 therapeutics company from a single conference room through IPO.
Learn more via New Scientist, Financial Times, and Endpoints on our bridge RNA discovery, which was cited in Forbes as one of 5 Important Medical Breakthroughs Of 2024. Our ML work was cited in the New York Times for the 2024 Good Tech Award, The Most Important Breakthroughs of 2024 in The Atlantic, and by STAT News. Check out recent podcasts with Sequoia and Eric Topol or New York Times and 60 Minutes pieces on our diagnostics work.

I invest in and advise startups, including Nudge, Cognition AI, The Bot Company, Inception Labs, Varda Space, Factory AI, Arbor Biotechnologies, Vial Health, Cradle.bio, Veda Bio, Kerna, Atomic AI, Medra AI, Portal Bio, Nucleus Genomics, Sphinx.bio (acquired, Benchling), Rewrite Therapeutics (acquired, Intellia), Replace Therapeutics (acquired), Serotiny (acquired, J&J), and many more.
I frequently invest with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross (investing $1M-$100M at a time, e.g. sourcing and leading our investments in Traversal, Abridge, NewLimit, and EvolutionaryScale, and supporting Function Health).
General areas of interest include AI, robotics, therapeutics, energy, defense, and frontier tech. I want to help smart people working on hard things to create a better future.
You can email me here