Yasheng Huang is an Honorary Senior Fellow on Economy and Technology at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis. He is also a Professor and holds the Epoch Foundation Professorship of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2013 to 2017, he served as an associate dean in charge of MIT Sloan’s global partnership programs and its action learning initiatives. His previous appointments include faculty positions at the University of Michigan and at Harvard Business School.

Dr. Huang is the author of seven books in English and another six in Chinese, as well as many academic papers on regulatory transparency, historical autocracy, statistical falsifications, tax, financing, sectoral and regulatory biases, history of reforms and strategy, political economy of controls, and more. His book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to its Decline (Yale University Press, 2023), was selected as a Best Book of the Year in 2023 by Foreign Affairs and is available in Japanese, traditional Chinese, Korean, Polish, and Bulgarian editions. His 2008 book, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, was selected as a Best Book of the Year in 2008 by the Economist.

He is collaborating with other scholars on a book project, Reframing the Needham Question, based on a comprehensive database on Chinese historical inventions (forthcoming from Princeton University Press). Another book, Statism with Chinese Characteristics (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), examines the economic reforms and performance of China since 1978. Professor Huang is also a co–principal investigator in a large-scale, multidisciplinary research project on food safety in China.

Outside of his academic research, Professor Huang has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Project Syndicate, Caixin, and Caijing. He is working on several policy projects related to U.S.-China relations. He was one of the co-authors of MIT’s report, “University Engagement with China: An MIT Approach,” and is a co-chair on the report’s implementation committee. He is a member of a task force at Asia Society on U.S.-China policy and a member of the Brookings-CSIS Advisory Council on Advancing U.S.-China collaboration. During 2023–24, he was a visiting fellow at the Kissinger Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

At MIT Sloan, Dr. Huang founded China Lab, ASEAN Lab, and India Lab, which have provided low-cost consulting services to hundreds of small and medium-sized enterprises. From 2015 to 2018, he ran a program in Yunnan Province to train female entrepreneurs (funded by the Goldman Sachs Foundation). He has held or received fellowships and grants such as the Sloan Foundation Grant, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Walmart Foundation Grant, a National Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Fellowship. The National Asia Research Program named him one of the most outstanding scholars in the United States conducting policy-relevant research. He has served as a consultant at the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and serves on advisory and corporate boards for nonprofit and for-profit organizations. He is a founding member and president of the Asian American Scholar Forum, an NGO dedicated to open science, the protection of rights, and the well-being of Asian American scholars.