Alumni spotlight on David Hsu: Applying statistics to advance policymaking
Dr. David Hsu is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at MIT and is currently serving as a Strategic Planner at the U.S. Department of Energy.
Hsu completed the Urban Design & Planning CSSS track during his PhD at the University of Washington (UW), graduating in 2010. Hsu studies energy, climate, and environmental policies in cities. His research and teaching focus on how planners, policymakers, and advocates can shape and implement systems using technology, data, and analysis.
Hsu spoke with CSSS about his non-traditional career path and the competitive value of quantitative skills. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: What led you into your current work?
Answer: I was always comfortable with math and numbers and did physics at Yale for undergrad. I started a PhD in physics at Cornell, but it wasn’t the right fit, and I left with a masters.
Then I worked in different areas: first engineering, then finance, and later city government — each for about three years. Eventually, I decided I wanted to put these things together and become an academic. If you take “engineering plus finance plus government” — you get urban planning!
That’s what led me to UW, for a PhD in Urban Planning in 2005. I loved it! Especially during my last couple years as a student, when I started working for Seattle City Light as well. It was a great combination, and I found I loved splitting my time: half the week on campus for academic learning and community, then going downtown to grapple with thorny problems in city government. Looking back, my wife always points out that doing both was one of my happiest times at work.
After my PhD, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, then MIT. Last year, I got tenure. With all my research, I try to be policy-minded and policy-oriented, and always think about what research would help push policy forward, or what policymakers need. When I started as a professor, a lot of my work was with my past city colleagues in Seattle and New York.
Reflecting on how happy I was during my PhD working at both UW and Seattle City Light, I realized how much I enjoy working both within and outside of academia. MIT faculty can take professional leave for public service, so I reached out to my former students who work at the Department of Energy. There was a great opportunity to work on integrating buildings and the electric grid – and that’s what I’m doing right now.
Q: How did you get involved with CSSS?
A: I came to grad school relatively late, and I wanted to learn things I hadn’t been able to learn through my previous jobs. Statistics was top of that list, because I knew it would be very useful. I’d worked in fields related to statistics, but I’d never taken a statistics class before I got to UW!
Looking for advice, I went to see Mark Handcock (a core CSSS faculty at the time), because he was collaborating with faculty in Urban Planning. I shared what I was hoping to do with statistical modeling and data, and he suggested I take STAT 512. It was a crazy thing to do because it was the PhD-level statistical theory class, and I had never taken any stats before.
That class with Michael Perlman was terrific, although I barely survived (I got 10 out of 60 on my first exam!). It was an intensely challenging, interesting class where I got to know other statistically minded students on campus. Even though I was thrown in the deep end, Mark was right that learning the theory was a good place to start. It helped me bridge from physics into statistics. I went on to take CSSS classes that exposed me to different ways of thinking about social science: hierarchical linear modeling with Adrian Dobra, causal inference with Thomas Richardson, categorical data analysis with Christopher Adolph and of course Bayesian statistics with Adrian Raftery. All those classes opened my eyes to what I could do with statistics.
I tell my students now that it's a competitive advantage to have strong quantitative skills. CSSS is what gave me the foundation to think about all the ways you could apply those quantitative skills, and to think about data gathering processes, visualization, communication, and analysis in new ways.
Q: Your academic work has explored many different areas. What’s a project you would highlight?
A: One project on building energy use was really shaped by what I learned from CSSS.
The New York City government mandated that building owners gather and disclose data on energy use, because nobody knew how much energy their buildings were using (since tenants pay for energy separately). The disclosure law came into effect in 2011, and instantly generated new data for over 10,000 buildings in New York. It was a massive data set, at least for that time, but the city didn’t really know what to do with it, and it had some data-quality issues.
My team and I worked with the city to improve the data quality by changing how they communicated the information back to building owners. We wrote a series of papers — including on data quality, how you could use these data as a policymaker or building owner, and estimating the policy’s energy impacts.
Ultimately, mandating disclosure lowered energy use intensity by about 14% after four years! We were surprised, because that’s a larger reduction than you see from many other energy efficiency policies. Our work helped lay out a method that can be applied to other datasets. Since then, this policy has spread from New York, San Francisco and D.C. to more than 50 cities and states.
That’s the kind of research I find most exciting — helping policymakers or implementers in government with research to inform effective policies.
Q: What’s one important piece of advice for trainees or graduate students today?
A: What I most treasure about my time at UW is how taking CSSS classes helped me meet statistically minded students from all over campus. Having that community of people who are interested in different things but share a common statistical language shaped my experience at UW and my career since then.
During my PhD, I never really understood why professors talk about their PhD years as their best times… because doing a PhD is really hard! But, as a PhD student, you have more time and space to interact with people in totally different fields than you — to make connections, talk to people, have fun, and learn new stuff.
So, my advice is to take advantage of your community, look around and be curious about what your classmates are studying — because those relationships and interactions can change your career down the road in ways you’d never expect.
Q: What was one of your favorite spots around the UW campus or the university district in Seattle?
A: There’s a Vietnamese restaurant on the Ave, Thanh Vị, where I’d go with colleagues and classmates for lunch all the time – often two to three times a week. Multiply that by 52 weeks in a year, and five years in the PhD…and that’s a lot of bowls of pho and bánh mì! I remember it so fondly as a place to go with friends and with my supervisor, to just talk about what we were working on — and the servers were always so friendly.
Q: What have you been reading, watching, or listening to lately that you’d recommend?
A: I’m in several book clubs right now – one with my neighbors, one with students, another with friends.
With my lab group, we focused on climate books all semester: nonfiction like The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle, and fiction like The Deluge by Stephen Markley. In another group we read Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman, a novel set in a superstore about people who work in these retail spaces.
I love the habit of coming together to discuss books in these groups — to spend the time reading but also how talking with friends about the books can enrich relationships.
Learn more about Hsu’s work on his faculty bio page, Google Scholar, and LinkedIn.
David enjoying the outdoors.
