Patrick Hsu

Career

Hsu co-founded the Arc Institute with Silvana Konermann and Patrick Collison; the three had earlier worked together on Fast Grants, a program for rapid science funding. Arc was founded in 2021 as an independent nonprofit research organization working in partnership with Stanford, UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco.²¹

Arc's lab page lists A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where Hsu worked on early CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing technologies. Hsu also holds a faculty appointment in pathology at Stanford University.¹

Research

The Hsu Lab develops technologies for biological design at the boundary of biology and machine learning. Its Evo models are trained on genomic sequence: the first Evo paper appeared in Science in November 2024, and Evo 2, first released as a preprint in February 2025, was published in Nature in March 2026.¹³⁴⁵

A second line of work concerns bridge recombinases, an RNA-guided system that can insert, invert or excise DNA segments. The lab, often with the Konermann Lab, has followed its 2024 Nature paper on bridge RNAs with work on megabase-scale rearrangement of the human genome, published in Science in September 2025.⁶¹²

Work and contributions

• Evo 2 Open weights

  Co-author of the Evo 2 paper, published in Nature in March 2026, on a DNA foundation model trained on genomes from all domains of life for prediction and design across DNA, RNA and proteins. Arc Institute releases the model code on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 license.⁵³⁷

• Evo Open weights

  Co-author, with Brian Hie among others, of the first Evo paper, published in Science in November 2024, on sequence modeling and design from the molecular to the genome scale.³¹⁸

• Bridge RNAs Published research

  Last author of the 2024 Nature paper showing that bridge RNAs direct programmable recombination of target and donor DNA; the paper links code and a Python package for designing bridge RNA sequences.⁶

• Evo 2 40B Open weights

  Listed by Nature among the authors who jointly supervised the Evo 2 paper (2026), and a corresponding author; the Evo 2 repository README cites that paper, and the repository lists evo2_40b among its checkpoints.⁵⁹⁷

• Evo 2 20B Open weights

  Listed by Nature among the authors who jointly supervised the Evo 2 paper (2026), and a corresponding author; the Evo 2 repository README cites that paper, and the repository lists evo2_20b among its checkpoints.⁵⁹⁷

Timeline

1. 2021Co-founded the Arc Institute with Silvana Konermann and Patrick Collison.²
2. Apr 2023Co-authored a Nature Biotechnology paper on systematic discovery of recombinases for large DNA insertions.¹
3. Jun 26, 2024Published the Nature paper showing bridge RNAs direct programmable DNA recombination.⁶
4. Nov 2024Co-authored the first Evo genome language model paper, published in Science.³¹
5. Feb 2025Released Evo 2 as a preprint with collaborators at Arc Institute.⁴
6. Sep 2025Co-authored a Science paper on megabase-scale human genome rearrangement with bridge recombinases.¹
7. Mar 4, 2026Evo 2 was published in Nature, with Hsu among its authors.⁵⁴

Honors and recognition

• Innovators Under 35 · MIT Technology Review¹

Where they work

• Arc Institute 4 people in the wiki
• Stanford University 40 people in the wiki

Related people

• Garyk BrixiAlso at Arc Institute
• Brian HieAlso at Arc Institute
• Silvana KonermannAlso at Arc Institute
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