Rujing Stacy Huang completed her PhD in music at Harvard University. An ethnomusicologist by training, her current research interests sit at the intersections of musicology (broadly defined), critical AI studies, and philosophy, with a latest focus on the political economy of music AI, that is, “creative” artificial intelligence technologies in relation to questions of labor, exploitation, and value. Prior to joining HKU, Huang was a postdoctoral researcher on the EU-funded MUSAiC project (“Music at the Frontiers of Artificial Creativity and Criticism”, 2020-2025), then one of the first musicologists in the world to perform humanistic critique on AI's encounter with musical cultures. Based on her doctoral research, she also runs a parallel project that examines the contemporary revivals of Chinese imperial ritual music in the broader context of China’s intellectual history. She is developing this work into a monograph.
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Huang has won numerous awards and fellowships, held leadership positions, and regularly sat on committees of international societies and conferences. She is a founding co-editor of Music and Data, a peer-reviewed journal published by University of California Press that examines the impact of emerging technologies on global music cultures. She is a co-director of the AI Song Contest, a Dutch foundation that organises an annual international competition exploring human-AI partnership in songwriting. The contest made the front page of The New York Times in 2021, and has since been covered in mainstream media worldwide. Since 2025, she is a founding co-director of the pioneering Music Entrepreneurship and Popular Practice (MEPoP) initiative at the University of Hong Kong. Huang is also preparing her first album as a singer-songwriter.