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Luyao Zhang

Assistant Professor of Economics at Duke Kunshan University
DKU Faculty

Overview


Research: Luyao (Sunshine) Zhang is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Economics and Senior Research Scientist at the Data Science Research Center at Duke Kunshan University (DKU). She conducts interdisciplinary research at the intersection of computational and economic sciences, addressing challenges for humanity, society, and sustainability through groundbreaking technologies, including big data, blockchain, generative AI, innovative computing, and geospatial frontiers. She is deeply passionate about interdisciplinary collaborations, particularly cutting-edge research with both profound insights and practical impacts, such as computational mechanism design, prescriptive machine learning, and human-AI interactions.

Her research appear in leading journals and conference proceedings spanning economics and computational sciences, including Review of Economics and Statistics, Nature Research Scientific Data, Springer Nature Social Indicators Research, Springer Nature Eastern Economic Journal, NeurIPS, ACM CCS, AAAI/ACM AIES, ACM CSCW, IEEE S&P, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (IC), Remote Sensing, Journal of Digital Earth, and Data and Information Management, among others.

She earned her Ph.D. in Economics from The Ohio State University, supported by the Presidential Fellowship and the National Science Foundation (NSF). She holds a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from Peking University. In addition, she has completed lifelong learning certifications, including the Oxford Blockchain Strategy Programme and multiple programs at MIT Professional Education, such as “Blockchain: Disruptive Technology,” “Advanced Reinforcement Learning,” “Data Engineering,” “Applied Generative AI for Digital Transformation,” and “Advanced Machine Learning for Big Data and Text Processing.”

Currently, her research, titled “Trust Mechanism Design on Blockchain: An Interdisciplinary Approach of Game Theory, Reinforcement Learning, and Human-AI Interactions,” is supported by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC).

She has been recognized with numerous accolades, including the Kunshan Shortage Industrial Talent Program Award in 2021 for her exceptional achievements as a highly sought-after talent. In 2022, she was named one of the 60 Pioneers in Blockchain Innovation by the National Collegiate Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Innovation Alliance. In 2023, she was elected as a National Member Representative of the China Computer Federation (CCF), and in 2024, she was selected for the Suzhou Association for Science and Technology Young Talent Support Program and recognized as a Senior Member of the CCF.

Teaching: Luyao has taught economics and interdisciplinary courses for students with diverse backgrounds in the U.S., Europe, and China, including proposing an Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy initiative. She has received several teaching awards for her innovative approaches to research-oriented and project-based education. Passionate about promoting undergraduate research and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), she has published studies on the theory and practice of innovative learning strategies in educational journals.

The courses she developed, such as “Intelligent Economics: An Explainable AI Approach,” “Computational Microeconomics,” and “Introduction to Machine Learning for Social Science,” reflect the spirit of fostering undergraduate research at the frontiers and have been incorporated into the undergraduate curriculum across disciplines. She spearheaded the “Industry 4.0 Open Education Resource Publication Initiatives” with support from the Duke Learning Innovation Center and the DKU Center for Teaching and Learning under the Carrying the Innovation Forward program.

Luyao also led the duke CS+ project titled “Decentralized Finance: Cryptocurrency and Blockchain on the Internet Computer” in collaboration with Computer Science professors and industry pioneers. As an adjunct faculty member at New York University (NYU) Shanghai, she taught statistics courses in Integrated Marketing at the School of Professional Studies and core economics courses, including Econometrics and Game Theory, in the Summer Program. She also jointly advised senior capstone projects, guiding students in completing their dissertations as part of the graduation requirements for earning degrees at NYU Shanghai.

Service: Luyao has dedicated herself to service with empathy, which she believes is a critical cornerstone of any civil society. She has served both the academic community and society at large. At DKU, to advance research, she serves on the Research Policy Committee; to care for students, she participates in the Faculty Adviser Program for student care in both the Social Sciences Division and the Natural and Applied Sciences Division and serves as an advisor to the founding teams of the DKU Finance Club and DKU AI Club. To contribute to university-wide intellectual conversations, she chairs the University Colloquium Committee.

Luyao has also been an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems. She was selected for the inaugural executive committee of the Technical Committee in Computational Economics (CCF TCCE) at the China Computer Federation, led by Prof. Xiaotie Deng, to pioneer research at the intersection of computer and economic sciences, cultivate interdisciplinary talents in computational economics, and foster real-world impacts in collaboration with industry partners and governments.

Globally, she has served as a program committee member or reviewer for journals and conferences spanning multiple disciplines. These include prestigious venues of enduring historical impact, such as Econometrica (ECMA), Review of Economic Studies (RES), ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO), ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference (ACM KDD), International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), and the AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES).

She has also contributed to pioneering venues of academic entrepreneurship, including Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) open access journals (Games, Electronics, Applied Sciences), the Annual Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research Conference, European Financial Management Association (EFMA) Annual Meeting, Portuguese Financial Network (PFN) Conference, Academy of Management (AoM) Annual Meeting, Decision and Game Theory for Security (GameSec), Crypto and Blockchain Economic Research (CBER) Forum Conference, International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) Workshop on Fintech and Decentralized Finance (FiDeFix) and Tech4Good Workshop, ChainScience, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) AI for Science Workshop (AI4Science), AAAI-24 Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Artificial Intelligence (PPAI-24), Crypto Finance Conference St. Moritz Academic Research Track (CfC-SMART24), China Computer Federation (CCF) Computational Economics (CE) Annual Conference, Cryptoeconomic System Blockchain Journal & Conference Series, MIT Bitcoin Expo, and many more.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Assistant Professor of Economics at Duke Kunshan University · 2020 - Present DKU Faculty

Education, Training & Certifications


Ohio State University · 2018 Ph.D.
Ohio State University · 2013 M.A.
Peking University (China) · 2012 B.A.