When Andrew Lo ’77 first entered Bronx Science, he was a young student who mixed up formulas and struggled to memorize his time tables. Now, he is returning as an esteemed economist, a professor of finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the keynote speaker for Bronx Science’s 97th Commencement Ceremony.
The graduation will take place on June 26th, 2025 at the historic United Palace Theater in Washington Heights, Manhattan. 751 graduating seniors will join faculty, family, and friends to celebrate the Class of 2025. Before the graduates walk across the stage adorned with caps and gowns, Lo hopes to inspire them with a message about his own journey through high school and beyond.
“It’s just an incredible honor that I never expected,” Lo said. “Bronx Science may have been the most influential force in my life that brought me toward where I am today, and I’m thrilled to be back.”
High school was a period of growth and self-confidence for Lo, after feeling like “a bit of a black sheep” throughout his childhood. As his family moved from Hong Kong to Taiwan to New York, Lo grew up in the shadow of two older siblings, both of whom excelled in mathematics while he received low marks. Lo felt pressured by the assumption that intelligence and success were synonymous with aptitude in STEM.
No one recognized that Lo’s frustrations stemmed from a learning disability called dyscalculia, the numerical equivalent of dyslexia. However, Lo’s time at Bronx Science provided the perfect learning environment for him to discover his strengths in mathematics and steer him towards his current career.
When Lo attended high school in the 1970s, Bronx Science had adapted its curriculum to reflect the increasingly popular “New Math” movement. This educational reform emphasized abstract concepts over memorization, replacing traditional requirements such as algebra, geometry, and trigonometry with groups, rings, fields, and isometries. For the majority of students, “New Math” was a confusing failure. For Lo, it was just what he needed.
“I could understand the concepts. So I went from being a C student in math to an A student pretty much overnight, which was a big shocker for me,” Lo said. He fondly remembers Ms. Henrietta Mazon’s senior year Calculus class, which taught him more about calculus than some of his college courses would later on.
Lo enjoyed a variety of other high school classes, such as a specialized physics course where he secured a ham radio license and several life-long friends. He also dedicated much of his time to research. Lo’s biology experiment was a finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (now known as the Regeneron Science Talent Search). He won first place in the New York City Science Fair for creating an early form of Artificial Intelligence, allowing him to play Monopoly against a computer whenever his siblings excluded him from their games.
“I found all of the teachers to be amazing, but even more importantly, I found the students to be phenomenal,” Lo said when recalling his years at Bronx Science. “Having classmates that were so smart and so keen to learn pushed me to areas that I never would have gone by myself.”
Lo next attended Yale University, where an economics class, originally taken to fulfill his social science requirement, inspired him to pursue a degree in the subject. He was fascinated by the idea of using mathematics in order to predict human behavior. The concept felt surreal and reminded him of his favorite science fiction series as a high schooler, the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov.
Lo also continued to learn invaluable lessons from his fellow classmates. One friend, a history major and president of the Yale Political Union, needed Lo’s help to study for a required math course. “It was so funny. He was hopeless with precalculus, and yet when you talked to him about any issue under the sun, he could out-debate you,” Lo said. “Yale was the very first time where I actually met people that I thought were incredibly smart but could not do math or science, and it shocked me.”
Thanks to his many Advanced Placement credits from Bronx Science, Lo graduated college a year early. He next attended Harvard University to earn his PhD, then moved to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to become an Assistant Professor.
Lo used his new role to further his passion for research. He studied a broad range of fields, including psychology, behavioral finance, and neuroscience. Through his studies, he finally discovered the name for the learning disability that had shaped his experience with math.
Now, as a Professor of Finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lo often reflects back and shares this journey with others. “When I tell students my own story, they get inspired and share with me their experiences. I’ve actually met many people who have had both dyslexia and dyscalculia and have struggled in the ways that I did. I’ve been really fortunate to identify some of these students, taking them on and mentoring them, and they’ve been some of my most successful students.”
Looking back on his career of over forty years, Lo is most proud not of his own achievements, but of his students’ accomplishments. “Professionally, having a student is very much like personally having a child,” Lo compared. He expressed his deep gratitude for the opportunity to teach and mentor a new generation of researchers, just as he feels privileged to have raised two children of his own.
In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Lo founded a quantitative investment management company called AlphaSimplex Group, and he has continued conducting research. His adaptive markets theory–“how psychology and economics and neuroscience and evolutionary biology all come together”–has garnered international attention and earned him a spot on Time magazine’s “100 most influential people in the world” list.
More recently, however, Lo takes pride in his contributions towards the biotechnology company BridgeBio Pharma. In 2015, he published a paper explaining how it would be less financially risky to establish a business that developed multiple drugs at the same time. A former student, Neil Kumar, read the paper and was intrigued. Over the next six months, Lo and Kumar expanded on the original research and ran around thirty-five additional simulations.
“At the end of that process, Kumar came into my office and said, ‘I just want to let you know I quit my job yesterday. I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna build this new company,’” Lo said, smiling and shaking his head. “That scared the hell out of me. I’ve never had that effect on anybody before in my life.”
Lo introduced Kumar to investors and helped launch the company, becoming a co-founder. BridgeBio Pharma quickly grew, and the company now has three approved drugs with several others in the pipeline. One drug currently in clinical trials treats a genetic neurological disorder called Canavan disease. Affected children experience developmental delays and regression, and usually do not live past the age of ten.
Last year, Lo had the privilege of meeting a father and his young daughter, “patient number 3” in the clinical trial. They convened at a coffee shop. Holding hands, the father and daughter walked up the stairs together to the store’s upper level.
“She would have been paralyzed by the time I met her, if it hadn’t been for this drug. And she was walking and playing,” Lo said. “It was a very, very emotional experience for me. It was the highlight of my professional career–to see something in theory put into practice and actually affect another person’s life.”
Lo’s numerous achievements in STEM are a reflection of his intelligence and success, fulfilling his childhood assumptions. But Lo has since learned that STEM is not the only path to greatness. Success can mean excelling in the humanities. Success can mean walking up the stairs against all biological odds. Success can come in all shapes and sizes.
No matter what “success” looks like to the Bronx Science Class of 2025, Lo hopes that all alumni are able to stay grounded in Bronx Science’s invaluable and formative community. It was this community that nurtured his intellectual curiosity, boosted his confidence in math, and propelled his career. Lo continues to appreciate these influences today.
“I now see how special a place Bronx Science is, for all sorts of reasons such as the dedication of the teachers and the quality of the students,” Lo said. “But I think the one thing that explains the value that I got from Bronx Science was the camaraderie of the students, who are drawn from all the boroughs of New York without regard to race, religion, or economic stature. The only thing that mattered was their academic pursuits and their quality of mind.”
He paused, briefly, perhaps transported back to high school memories. “It is something to be celebrated.”
UPDATE: Click HERE to watch the video of Bronx Science’s 97th Commencement Ceremony at The United Palace Theater, which was held on Thursday, June 26th, 2025, including the speech given by Bronx Science’s Keynote Address Commencement Speaker, Andrew Lo ’77. Lo’s speech starts at 24:29.
“Bronx Science may have been the most influential force in my life that brought me toward where I am today, and I’m thrilled to be back,” said Andrew Lo ’77.