Hsiao-Tieh Hsu

Hsiao-Tieh Hsu is a 4th-year PhD candidate in Chemistry and a member of Prof. Kate Mahers research group in the Department of Geological Sciences at Stanford. By leveraging her background in chemistry, she is currently working on advancing analytical methods for soil organic carbon characterization in order to develop a new generation of global carbon cycle model and study how the carbon cycle responds to climate change.

Before joining Prof. Mahers group, she worked on various projects related to human health, including developing transition metal-based biosensors, evaluating biopharmaceutical properties of drug candidates, and studying a bioorthogonal catalyst-activated bioluminescence imaging system that can potentially be used for diagnostics or targeted therapy. She also helped build the StartX-QB3 Labs (a partnership between StartX, a startup accelerator, and QB3, an incubator in the Bay Area) to facilitate medical startups develop their products, and she is a partner of the Stanford Healthcare Consulting Group. Therefore, in addition to environmental issues, she has a keen interest in how these issues affect human health.

Hsiao-Tieh received her BA in chemistry and linguistics and MS in chemistry (4-year accelerated BA/MS program) from Northwestern University in 2013. She was one of the two first recipients of the Lambert Fellowship at Northwestern and was awarded the Undergraduate Award in Inorganic Chemistry by the American Chemical Society. At Northwestern, she did research with Prof. Tom Meade in the Chemistry Department on electronic biosensors and her work is currently being used commercially by Ohmx Corporation. She also interned at Amgen Inc. to help build a database as a platform to share biopharmaceutical data between different R&D divisions. Outside of research, she was very active in science outreach and served as an outreach associate for Northwesterns Undergraduate Chemistry Council, Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.