Stephanie Hsieh ’89, the new president of the Wellesley College Alumnae Association, jokes that her path to the College was “the happiest accident of my life.” She mostly grew up in New York City, but her family lived in Australia for her last two years of high school. She wanted to go to school near Boston because of fond memories of the city from when her father, a Red Sox fan, would take her family to games at Fenway. Reading Barron’s Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges in Australia, she was intrigued by an essay by a Wellesley student, and she put the College on her list.

Surprised to see it there, her father asked her, “You know your aunt’s on the board of trustees, right?” (Shirley Young ’55, who died in 2020, was a pioneering businesswoman and devoted alumna.) In fact, Hsieh didn’t remember ever hearing about Wellesley—but it wound up being the place for her (and for her sister, Jennifer Hsieh ’98).

Hsieh grew up loving science and had wanted to be a doctor since kindergarten. At Wellesley, she majored in biochemistry, minored in mathematics, and completed all the premed requirements. But it became increasingly clear that med school wasn’t the right fit. On a trip to New York after her family moved back there, she shadowed a pediatric oncology resident at Sloan Kettering. “I was like, I can’t do this. I was bawling,” Hsieh says.

As Hsieh worked on a senior thesis in organic chemistry, she realized lab life wasn’t for her, either. “I love reading about new innovations in biochemistry. … I did not love being in the lab,” she says. “I’m too much of an extrovert. Sitting in a windowless lab for hours on end watching something drip out of columns just was not my jam.”

But then her thesis advisor, David Haines, recommended that she go to a lunch for students with an alumna who had recently become a patent attorney. “It sounded like the perfect fit. Learning about new technologies, everything that’s cutting edge—and interpreting patent claims is like playing word games,” Hsieh says. So, after graduation, she earned her J.D. from Columbia and developed an expertise in biotechnology and pharmaceutical intellectual property law.

After several years, Hsieh realized she really wanted to be leading companies herself. She earned an M.B.A. at Stanford, then became founder and CEO of Meditope Biosciences, a cancer therapeutics biotech company. She’s since served on a number of corporate boards and is currently interim CEO of BioscienceLA, a nonprofit ecosystem accelerator for life sciences.

In 1999, Hsieh and her husband, Harlan Irvine, moved to Pasadena, Calif. “My community was all my husband’s friends from high school and his family, and they were awesome, but not really my own community,” she says. She went to a day of service event sponsored by Wellesley-in-Pasadena, “and all of a sudden I was home again, without even realizing it,” she says. Hsieh took on leadership roles in Wellesley-in-Pasadena and Wellesley’s Business Leadership Council and served on the WCAA board from 2019–23. She has relished making friends across generations of alums, including Diana Lam ’20, currently the young alumna representative on the WCAA board, who was Hsieh’s walking buddy in the early days of the pandemic when Lam was finishing her senior year remotely at her family’s home in California.

Hsieh will bring her experience building new companies and managing change to her role as president of the WCAA. “What are the pieces of tradition that serve us well and we can continue to deepen, and what are the things that just really aren’t serving us well? How can we reenvision how we engage with each other and how we engage with the College and support it and its mission?” Hsieh says. “There’s this huge opportunity now.”