On Friday June 2nd, 2023, the Bronx High School of Science had the honor of welcoming alumni Dr. Andrew Lo ’77 back to be inducted into the Bronx Science Hall of Fame. Dr. Lo is a professor of finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s- Sloan School of Management, the director of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, and a principal investigator at MIT’s computer science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He also founded the AlphaSimplex group, a quantitative investment company, in 1999; serving  as its chairman and chief strategist until 2018. Additionally, he has received a number of awards, including being named one of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People.” 

Born in Hong Kong and raised in Taiwan, Dr. Lo always felt out of place growing up. The youngest of three siblings, he had always struggled in math. Growing up in New York with high parental expectations, it was especially difficult for him when he was consistently not getting higher than a B or C. It didn’t help that his two older siblings both excelled at the subject. In an interview, Dr. Lo told a group of Bronx Science students, “Being bad at math wasn’t really an option.” Before coming to Bronx Science, Dr. Lo was discouraged by his middle school teachers. “I was told I was lazy, even though I was working really hard. It wasn’t until later that I realized that what I had was a learning issue.” When Dr. Lo was in middle school, he discovered he had a learning disability called Dyscalculia, a mathematical disability that hinders one’s ability to perform arithmetic calculations. After learning this, Dr. Lo acknowledged that it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t comprehend what his teachers were saying to him. “When a student doesn’t learn or understand, it’s not the student’s fault, it’s the teacher’s fault. We have so much respect for faculty but not all of them deserve our respect,” said Dr. Lo. It wasn’t until Dr. Lo got to Bronx Science that his attitude towards math changed. 

In 1973, the Board of Education implemented a teaching style called “New Math.” The teaching style emphasized the fundamental concepts of math, rather than focusing on specific branches of mathematics, such as Algebra and Geometry. For a student who struggled with Dyscalculia, this new emphasis on concepts was exactly what Dr. Lo needed to go from a C student to an A student in math. 

Throughout his time at Bronx Science, Dr. Lo also discovered his love for computer science. He liked computers because they did all the math for him, allowing him to focus on the rules and principles, not on the numbers. As a high school student, Dr. Lo programmed a computer to play monopoly with him and later became president of the computer club. 

Dr. Lo graduated from Bronx Science in 1977 and began his undergraduate degree at Yale University with a focus in economics, and later completed his PhD at Harvard University. Once at Harvard, he realized that although many of the students were extremely smart and passionate, there was a real hierarchy, in both a social and economic sense. Dr. Lo acknowledged that it wasn’t intentional. “There were the private school kids, and there were the rest of us. One of the things I love most about Bronx Science is that there is no hierarchy. It didn’t matter who you were or what your ethnicity, background, and socioeconomic class was. I grew up with a single mother. In the 1970s, my mother faced a lot of discrimination and gender bias. We didn’t have a lot of money. New York City public school systems are wonderful, in that you can come to school, and it doesn’t matter where you came from. For the first time, it felt like I was at home.” 

This culture is also what led Dr. Lo to later teach at MIT. “MIT was more like Bronx Science,” Dr. Lo said. “The smart kids were the cool kids. The only difference was that MIT is way more one dimensional because it is more about STEM. At MIT, if you’re not good at science and math, you must not be smart. When I got to Yale, I was in the same ignorant mode myself, where I thought to be smart, you needed to be good at science or math. I met so many people who couldn’t solve a quadratic equation but could tell you an analytical response about the kind of geopolitical situation we are currently in.” 

When Dr. Lo first started at MIT, he began his research applying mathematical and statistical models to the stock market. He never really understood the stock market and wanted to figure out how the reporters at the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times knew what they were talking about. “I ended up calling the Wall Street Journal,” he said, “And it turns out, they didn’t know what they were talking about either. I ended up telling them about my predictions and somehow wound up in the newspaper.” After publishing his research, Dr. Lo started his own Hedge Fund entitled AlphaSimplex Group.

Fifteen years ago, Dr. Lo had an academic epiphany when many of his family members and friends began dealing with cancer. “I even thought I was carcinogenic because everyone around me was dying! It was then that I felt that all of my academic work was useless.”

Back in the 1970s, Dr. Lo took part in the biology research program, ending as one of the seven finalists from Bronx Science. With help from some of this background knowledge, he later realized that finance played a big role in cancer drug development. He noticed finance was actually driving the science, not the other way around. As a result, Dr. Lo co-founded numerous biotech companies that developed treatments for diseases. 

Having worked in healthcare for ten years, one of Dr. Lo’s colleagues at MIT contacted him and asked if his research could apply to fusion energy. “I thought cold fusion was debunked as voodoo science, but in fact, in the last two years, scientists and engineers have actually achieved a fusion reaction. This changes everything, as humanity now has the ability to create net energy with no negative environmental effects.” Dr. Lo now works to apply his concepts for funding cancer drugs to ignition, or the ability to create fusion energy. 

Dr. Lo truly embodies the characteristics of what every Bronx Science student strives to be. Not only has he been successful in every field he chooses to conquer, but the message he sends also makes a difference in students’ day-to-day lives, inspiring them to find their passions one lecture at a time. 

Dr. Lo’s discussion with students can be watched in a video which is embedded above. 

Dr. Lo truly embodies the characteristics of what every Bronx Science student strives to be. Not only has he been successful in every field he chooses to conquer, but the message he sends also makes a difference in students’ day-to-day lives, inspiring them to find their passions one lecture at a time.