Shan Huang is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, a Digital Fellow at Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab, and a consultant to Tencent. She earned her Ph.D. in Management Science from the MIT Sloan School of Management, an MSc from the University of British Columbia, and a B.BA from Tsinghua University.

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Her research examines technology-enabled marketing strategies and decision making. She integrates large-scale digital experimentation—such as A/B testing and causal inference—with artificial intelligence techniques, including machine learning and large language models (LLMs), to generate insights into digital behaviors and to develop new methodological tools that advance data-driven decision making for emerging social media platforms. Empirically, her work investigates how social media platforms shape advertising effectiveness, social referrals, and content diffusion. Methodologically, she develops tools to systematically improve the external validity of digital experiments as a decision-making instrument, helping reduce the gap between in-experiment results and real-world decision quality for both research and industry applications. Her recent papers focus on methods for estimating long-term treatment effects from short-term experiments, considering user-behavior dynamics and sample-characteristic shifts over time. Her work has appeared in Management Science, Marketing Science, and other leading management journals, as well as premier computer science venues such as ACM EC, and has been supported by over HKD 3 million in competitive research grants.

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Professor Huang views research, teaching, and practice as deeply interconnected. Since 2015, she has collaborated extensively with Tencent, launching WeChat’s first large-scale A/B test and co-developing its experimentation infrastructure. Her methodological innovations have been adopted by Tencent and ByteDance, directly influencing practice. At HKU, she designed and teaches Digital Experimentation Methods, a course that earned the Faculty Teaching Innovation Award in 2024. She is also co-authoring a forthcoming book with senior industry leaders, documenting China’s experience with experimentation and data-driven decision making for a global audience.

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