Zikun Ye

I am an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Michael G. Foster School of Business at the University of Washington.

My research builds and deploys artificial intelligence. My work spans three threads:

• LLM-augmented market research — Augmenting market research with LLMs to do more with less human data, through meta learning, alignment, rectification, and adaptive sampling.
• Building agentic AI — Designing AI agent systems for business applications, with attention to orchestration, inference efficiency, and real-world deployment.
• Data-driven algorithm design — Combining causal machine learning, optimization, and large-scale field experiments to tackle operations and marketing problems, with deployments at online advertising platforms and marketplaces.

Before joining the Foster School of Business, I earned my Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2023 and my Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Engineering with Zhiyuan honors from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2018.