Bio

The ability to turn ideas into opportunities helped Dr. Huang be successful as a corporate executive, an entrepreneur, and an academic.

Inspired by school friends with paper route jobs, Dr. Huang founded a door-to-door neighborhood advertisement distribution service while in junior high school in Richardson, Texas.  Dr. Huang began his professional career as a software engineer at IBM.  Dr. Huang’s IBM career turning point came three years later when he was asked to be the CRITSIT (critical situation) manager to manage a customer satisfaction issue where a large insurance company customer requested a $60M refund.  By listening to the customer and working with all stakeholders, Dr. Huang turned around the customer satisfaction issue and saved this $60M project.

After successfully founding and growing a professional services organization at IBM from scratch to a $170M organization, Dr. Huang left IBM to become an entrepreneur.  Through his ability to listen, collaborate, and innovate, Dr. Huang was able to secure $12M venture funding from Morgan Stanley Venture for a software startup during the most challenging time in the economy, shortly after the September 11^th terrorist attack on the NY Twin Towers. 

Dr. Huang decided to focus on the education industry after two successful venture capital-backed tech startups. In 2010, he founded the Texas-based Cranehill Learning Services company and acquired a financially distressed preschool in Allen, Texas.  Through his ability to listen, collaborate, and innovate, Dr. Huang turned this preschool around and increased its enrollment by 500% a year later. The preschool offers a unique multi-lingual and multi-culture program that teaches diversity and inclusion to children at young ages.  Staff and children at the preschool represent nine ethnic groups and countries.

Inspired by his late entrepreneurial mentor, Dr. George Kozmetsky, Dr. Huang decided to venture into higher education. In 2016, he joined UCLA and served as an academic department director at UCLA Extension and as a lecturer at UCLA School of Engineering, teaching computer science undergraduates and graduate students in the MSOL/MEng program. Dr. Huang founded the UCLA Silicon Beach Innovation Lab to promote women and diversity in technology and tech entrepreneurship.

At University of Maryland, Dr. Huang taught university college courses in computer networking and communication protocols.

At UCLA, Dr. Huang taught Samueli School Of Engineering graduate and undergraduate classes in engineering entrepreneurship, data science, leadership and innovation, computer science, and master of engineering capstone. Dr. Huang also created and taught UCLA Extension’s data science certificate, which includes courses in introduction to data science, machine learning, exploratory data analysis and visualization, and big data analytics.

Dr. Huang also taught modern software development at Cornell Tech to graduate CS, MBA, and LLM students.

At Harvard, Dr. Huang teaches HES graduate classes in data science and guides ALM degree candidates on capstone projects.