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A brief bio --

Yingyao Hu is a Chinese American economist. He is currently the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. His areas of research include econometrics, empirical industrial organization, labor economics, measurement error and latent variable models.

Hu was born in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in 1972. His parents were among the 97,000 Shanghai zhiqing (知青), or zhishi qingnian (知识青年), “the educated youths,” mobilized by the Chinese state to migrate to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (新疆生产建设兵团) from 1963 to 1966. Hu went to the elementary, middle, and high schools in Xinjiang. He was admitted to the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University as the 14th highest scored student of Xinjiang in 1989. He graduated from Tsinghua University with a B.E. in 1994 and from Fudan University with a M.A. in 1997. He studied in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University for one year in 1998, and then transferred to the Johns Hopkins University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in economics (2003) and M.S.E. in Mathematical Sciences (2001).

For more details, see the Wikipedia page set up by his students as a 50^th birthday gift.