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 at UC Berkeley (where I am an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and Deb Faculty Fellow in the College of Engineering), and helped to start Fast Grants.
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.
Some of our contributions or inventions include the discovery of the first programmable recombinases, the Evo AI foundation model trained on genomes, the most widely used tools for CRISPR-based RNA targeting, and CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing in human cells.
I have co-founded multiple biotechnology and therapeutics companies, such as Stylus Medicine and Circle Labs, 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, STAT News on our bio x AI research, an a16z podcast, and New York Times and 60 Minutes pieces on our diagnostics work.

I invest in and advise startups, including The Bot Company, Varda Space, Arbor Biotechnologies, Vial Health, Veda Bio, Factory.ai, Atomic.ai, Medra.ai, Sphinx.bio, Teiko.bio, Cradle.bio, Nucleus Genomics, Stipple Bio, Dover, Rewrite Therapeutics (acquired, Intellia), Replace Therapeutics (acquired), Serotiny (acquired, J&J), and many more.
I also invest with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross as a Venture Partner (investing $1M-$100M at a time, e.g. co-leading the seed round in EvolutionaryScale).
General areas of interest include AI, robotics, therapeutics, defense, and frontier tech (e.g. BCI). I want to help smart people working on hard things to create a better future.
You can email me here