Laura Huang

Laura Huang is an associate professor of business administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit. Prior to joining HBS, she was an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Professor Huang’s research examines early-stage entrepreneurship, and the role of interpersonal relationships and implicit factors in the investment decisions of financiers such as angel investors and VCs. Her work studies the subtle signals and cues that often impact the behavioral perceptions of investors, which can lead to implicit bias in the investing process. Her research has been published in several academic journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has also been featured in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, and Nature. She has won a number of awards for her research, and was named one of the 40 Best Business School Professors Under the Age of 40 by Poets & Quants.

Professor Huang earned a PhD in management from the University of California, Irvine; an MBA from INSEAD; and an MS and BSE in electrical engineering, both from Duke University. Before entering academia, she held positions in investment banking, consulting, and general management, for organizations such as Standard Chartered Bank, IBM Global Services, and Johnson & Johnson, in a variety of global locations. She has also served as an advisor to several start-ups in the US, Europe, Southeast Asia, and China.

Professor Huang is the author of Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage (Portfolio-Penguin, Jan 2020).