Jerry Hsu
Grade 12 · Taipei, Taiwan

Hi, I'm Jerry. There's more here than meets the eye.

Small things, big questions

  • MagicOne glance decides what a whole room believes.
  • The labA curve too small to see changes how a material handles light.
  • The courtOne defender's shift opens up the whole play.
Now

Taking the Taiwan Physics Olympiad preliminary round for the third time. Third time's the charm?

Jerry in his school hallway, smiling, holding a ball and making a peace sign
MoS₂ on a nanosphere · top view

Run my experiment.

Drag the laser across the sphere. I measured 17 points, 0.3 µm apart, and watched the spectrum change.

Point 1 of 17 · flat MoS₂

Schematic of the trends we measured, not real data. Dashed line: flat MoS₂.

Meet me in one minute

A small white ball, two years of research, and why I want to spend next year somewhere new. Keep an eye on the ball.

1-minute intro video goes here
Watch on YouTube →

Why a different road, again

I grew up around conversations about new technology and startups, and I've watched AI tools start to change how research is done, how people work, and how everyone gets through an ordinary day. Nobody can predict where this wave lands. That is exactly why I don't want to follow a fixed plan.

What I'm excited to learn next is how these tools are changing the way science gets done, from designing experiments to reading spectra like mine. I want to step out of my comfort zone, get close to the people building them, and open doors I don't know exist yet. Then I want to bring what I learn back to research, where I think I can contribute the most.

My number one reason for a year at The Academy: to learn from people who build, while the ground is still moving.

This isn't a new habit. I chose a small, unusual science program over the obvious high school, and a materials physics lab over a familiar topic. A year at The Academy is the next different road, and it fits who I am.

MoS₂ on nanospheres

Growing up in Taiwan, I heard the word semiconductor long before I understood the physics inside one. Quantum physics made me want to know what was happening underneath it. When my science program asked every student to do two years of research, most of us picked subjects we already knew. I wanted the opposite. I went looking for a materials physics lab, found the Center for Condensed Matter Sciences at National Taiwan University, and emailed a lab I had never met.

My research partner and I studied what happens when MoS₂, a sheet only a few atoms thick, sits on glass scattered with nanospheres: how it bends, how much it is strained, and how its Raman and photoluminescence (PL) spectra respond.

I couldn't see the material bending. The spectrum could.

With Yu-Lin Lai. Advisor: Dr. Shao-Yu Chen, Center for Condensed Matter Sciences, National Taiwan University. Supported by two graduate student mentors. Presented at Syzygy, the 16th Science Program research symposium at NTNU Affiliated Senior High.

What we did

  1. Spin-coated nanospheres onto glass (0.5 wt% solution, 5 s at 500 rpm, then 40 s at 2000 rpm), following Park, Na & Bae (2019).
  2. Made MoS₂ samples on PDMS by mechanical exfoliation.
  3. Cleaned the PDMS with UV-ozone for 2 minutes, lined up MoS₂ (top) and the glass (bottom) on a transfer stage, heated to 70 °C and let it sit for 15 minutes so the MoS₂ draped over the spheres.
  4. Scanned a line across a sphere at room temperature: high- and low-wavenumber Raman at 17 points, and PL at 21 points, all spaced 0.3 µm apart.
  5. Cooled the sample to about 80 K and measured PL and upconversion PL on a sphere and on the flat material next to it.
  6. Subtracted the substrate signal in Origin Pro and tracked each peak's center, width (FWHM) and integrated area.

What we found

  • Raman. On a sphere, the E¹₂g peak shifted clearly to lower wavenumber and broadened, while A₁g stayed put. Both peaks got stronger. That points to tensile strain, bending, and more efficient scattering.
  • Low-wavenumber Raman. The signal on the spheres was much stronger, which makes these modes easier to measure.
  • Room-temperature PL. The PL blue-shifted on the spheres and the first peak got narrower. Some peak wavelengths became sharper but came with a fixed offset that can be removed mathematically.
  • PL at 80 K. Cooling removed the cause of the blue shift. Then both PL and upconversion PL red-shifted, the same tensile-strain signature the Raman showed. The upconversion peak near 434 nm also lost much of its intensity.

When the two-year school requirement ended, I stayed. My professor and I are now discussing publishing the work in a journal. Next, I want to see how the effect changes with different layer numbers, other materials, and nanosphere sizes.

Why it matters

In Taiwan, semiconductors are hard to ignore. As transistors approach the limits of silicon, researchers are exploring semiconductors only a few atoms thick, like MoS₂, for future chips. Strain is one way to tune them. Chipmakers have used strained silicon to speed up transistors for about two decades, and in 2D materials, stretching changes how they absorb and emit light.

The field is exploring this for tunable light sources and detectors, flexible sensors, and, at the sharpest bumps, single-photon sources for quantum communication. Our results point to a simple, scalable way in: a spin-coated layer of nanospheres strains MoS₂ in a way light can read, as long as you separate the strain from everything else that shifts a spectrum.

From tape to poster

Gloved hands using tweezers and tape to exfoliate MoS2 on a cutting mat
01Peeling MoS₂ down to a few atomic layers with tape.
Blue and white MoS2 flakes on a dark substrate under an optical microscope
02Flakes under the microscope. Color reveals thickness.
A thin MoS2 flake on a substrate dotted with dark nanospheres
03A flake on glass dotted with nanospheres.
A gloved hand adjusting a mirror on an optical table in a dark lab, lit by a green laser
04Aligning the optics. The spectrum shows the strain the eye can't see.
Jerry and his research partner with their advisor in front of their research poster
05Presenting our results at Syzygy.

A class of 27

My entrance exam scores could have taken me to Taipei's top-ranked high school. I took a less traveled path instead, because I love science and wanted to do it for real: a 27-student science program that compresses three years of coursework into two and leaves the last year for university-level work.

It turned out to be packed. We took university calculus at NTNU in Grade 11, spent two years on research in university labs, met students from other schools and other countries, and turned our research showcase into a murder mystery.

Nine students from the science program in navy T-shirts, one holding a sign that reads HSNU Science Class
A slice of the class. With only 27 of us, nine people is a third.

Across borders

Taiwanese and Japanese high school students sitting in a circle, making peace signs
Swapping ideas, and peace signs, with students from our partner school in Japan.
Four students with luggage and tote bags in a hotel lobby
On the road for the Japan exchange.

Giving it back

Whatever I find, I want to bring it back to the kids who are where I was a few years ago. Our class volunteers to run hands-on science for children, including a booth at the Taiwan Science Festival.

Science program students in school uniforms guiding a group of children through a hands-on activity at a festival booth
Running a hands-on booth with Taiwan Power Company at the Taiwan Science Festival.

A science murder mystery

For our science program's research showcase, we wove very different projects in physics, earth science, math and drones into one live mystery play. A professor is murdered in the opening scene, and the audience solves it with science. The real professors survived.

The idea was much more fun to imagine than to execute. Scripts, presentations, transitions, rehearsals, teachers and an audience all had to arrive at the same place at the same time. I set milestones and checkpoints, finished my own presentation early, then spent the next several weeks helping classmates revise their slides and scenes.

On the day, I was one of the people holding a microphone. By then, most of the leadership had already happened.

CASE FILE
Victim
One (fictional) professor
Evidence
Physics, earth science, math, drones
Witnesses
~300, including students from four high school science programs and university professors
Clues hidden on this page
Jerry speaking into a microphone at the podium, next to the class logo on the screen
Opening the showcase.
Students performing the play on stage while Jerry runs the show from the podium at bottom left
Bottom left, at the laptop: me, running the show.

Magic taught me to watch small things

Where do someone's eyes move just before the reveal? How long can I pause before curiosity becomes suspicion? A trick can be rehearsed hundreds of times, but an audience can't. So I learned to watch quietly, notice tiny shifts in attention, and adjust.

What you see is not always what is happening.

Find the sphere under the MoS₂

Watch the ball. It's under the middle sheet.

I play point guard “like a coach”

That's my dad's verdict, and he once managed a professional basketball team in Taiwan. At seventeen, I wasn't sure it was a compliment.

I rarely see a possession as just the ball and the basket. I watch where the defense is shifting, which teammate is about to get open, and whether giving up a good shot now creates a better one two passes later.

I'm quiet by nature, and I used to think leaders were the people most comfortable at the center of attention. Yet teachers kept asking me to lead, and classmates kept choosing me to coordinate them. A coach can't see everything, and neither can I. I'm still learning to see the whole court.

Jerry in a black and gold jersey, crouched low on defense against a taller player
Defense first. Watch the hips, not the ball.
Jerry holding a basketball and signalling a play to a teammate
Calling the next play.

Wins, and a few retries

Math

  • Taiwan Regions Mathematics LeagueNational team gold · top 5% individual
  • Taiwan National Olympic Mathematics Team CompetitionIndividual gold · team excellence
  • University calculus at NTNU, Grade 11A+ both semesters

Words

  • National High School English Debate TournamentWinning team
  • Nationwide High School Short Essay CompetitionMerit award
Science program students on stage as one of them hands a trophy to the principal
Handing our math team's championship trophy to the principal, on behalf of the school.
Jerry and his debate teammates on stage holding signs, under a Winning Teams banner
Winning team, National High School English Debate Tournament (policy debate).

Not yet

Every good trick starts as a bad one. A few things I'm still working on:

  • Taiwan Physics Olympiad, preliminary round

    #1 · Grade 10 · PR 76→#2 · Grade 11 · PR 92→#3 · Grade 12 · in progress

    PR = percentile rank. PR 92 means I scored higher than 92% of everyone who took it.

  • YC Startup School Taipei 2026

    Said not this time. Inbox refreshes stopped at 1,284. Building anyway.

Say hi

Got a strange material, a good trick, or an open teammate? Tell me.

hello@jerryh.me