Ya-Chieh Hsu joined Harvard University in the summer of 2014 and is currently an associate professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. She is also a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Ya-Chieh first became interested in scientific research during high school, after a fun and eye-opening summer research experience in Henry Sun’s lab at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She obtained her B.Sc in Life Science from National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan, and spent her junior year at the University of Toronto as an exchange student. In college, she explored a variety of research topics, including chaperone biochemistry with Walid Houry at University of Toronto and the EGFR pathway with Jui-Chou Hsu at National Tsing-Hua University. She completed her PhD in Developmental Biology at Baylor College of Medicine with Kwang-Wook Choi, where she studied organ size control using Drosophila as a model. During her postdoctoral studies with Elaine Fuchs at The Rockefeller University, she defined the stem cell-progeny relationship for the regenerating hair follicles and discovered that the stem cell progeny send feedback signals to regulate their parental stem cells.