Dr. Kai Huang is the Dean of Research and Lab Infrastructure at Duke Kunshan University. He oversees several functional units, including the Research Support Office, Lab Management Office and Lab Safety Office, and provides effective support for faculty members to pursue their teaching and research activities.

Dr. Huang is a soft matter physicist with a research interest in understanding, predicting and eventually controlling the collective behavior of particulate materials through laboratory experiments, numerical and analytical approaches, in order to shed light on widespread applications in civil and process engineering, geoscience and other areas. He is also interested in the acoustical design of traditional European and Chinese opera theaters.

Huang has a B.Sc. in electronic engineering and a Ph.D. in physical acoustics from Nanjing University. He completed his postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-organization, before joining the University of Bayreuth as a group leader and lecturer for both undergraduate and graduate level courses. His research activity was funded by German Research Foundation, Sino-German Center for Research Promotion, and the State of Bavaria. In 2014, he obtained habilitation in physics, a scientific and pedagogic qualification for supervising PhD students independently in Bavarua, Germany.