The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s education work has a new leader: Sandra Liu Huang, who has worked as the organization’s head of product and technology.
Huang now holds one of the most influential jobs in education: overseeing how CZI — which has already spent more than $300 million on education and is set to receive Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune — tries to influence schools and classrooms.
Huang takes over for Jim Shelton, the former deputy education secretary under President Obama. Unlike Shelton, her background is in technology, and she ran product teams at Quora, Facebook, and Google before moving to CZI in 2017.
There, she oversaw the education team’s partnership with the Summit Learning platform, the personalized learning program that Facebook engineers helped build and is now supported by CZI. (The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative also supports Chalkbeat.)
CZI announced the hire Tuesday.
“With her deep background in managing complex, interdisciplinary teams and building tools and products that help people learn, Sandra Liu Huang is the ideal leader to carry forward our vision for what’s possible in education,” Priscilla Chan, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s co-founder, said in a statement.
Huang’s appointment ties CZI’s education work even more closely to Summit, which CZI says is now used in 380 schools nationwide. Offered free to schools, Summit has emerged as a poster child for the personalized learning approach — and attracted some backlash from students and parents, too.
CZI says its education mission remains the same, and Summit is a key part of its work.
“Since my tours at Google and then at Facebook, I’ve essentially been on a pursuit to build the products and platforms that I see as inevitable — the Jetsons world is at hand,” Huang said in a 2015 interview with the website Brit + Co describing her career. “I’m inspired by how technology massively accelerates knowledge sharing, but I also think the web can be more than ways to pass time.”