Our Team

Dr. Simon Koo is Executive Director of The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, where he leads academic planning, accreditation, research, and global partnerships in support of TBC’s mission of dialogue between China and the rest of the world.

Jesuit-educated, Dr. Koo attended Wah Yan College, Kowloon, a Jesuit secondary school in Hong Kong, and the Jesuit values he encountered there have shaped his work in education ever since.

Trained as an engineer, Dr. Koo has published more than 40 peer-reviewed technical articles. His scholarship now follows two paths. In Jesuit-China studies, he has authored and edited books on the intellectual legacy of Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit encounter with China, and East-West dialogue, and he is a Research Associate at the Centre for Catholic Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. In artificial intelligence, he examines how AI is reshaping education and the way young people come to know and think, drawing on questions of ethics and epistemology. He has been invited to speak on these questions as a panelist, most recently at the 2026 Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai.

Dr. Koo also writes for Pax Lumina, a Jesuit magazine on peace and reconciliation published by the Jesuit Conference of South Asia.

Before TBC, Dr. Koo held faculty positions at the University of San Diego and Santa Clara University, teaching computer science, engineering, mathematics, philosophy, and finance. As an entrepreneur, he founded a series of technology start-ups in Silicon Valley and Hong Kong, incubated at Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks and at Plug and Play Tech Center.

His teaching has been recognized with the Magoon Award for Excellence in Teaching and the National Academy of Engineering CASEE New Faculty Fellowship. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a member of American Mensa, Sigma Xi, and Upsilon Pi Epsilon.