SE Vegas News

Kaiyang Wu, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is crediting the school with providing a road map for his career.

In a university news release, Wu said that working at a restaurant buffet made him examine why consumers are drawn to certain foods.

“I also saw a lot of food waste behavior as well. That triggered me to focus on consumer behavior and specifically to understand different consumer practices and why consumers do things, oftentimes, irrationally,” Wu said in the release.

He credits professors at UNLV who urged him to obtain a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I think when I first tell people I study marketing, they think I am a salesperson because I can be quite talkative," he said. "Sales is a very important part of marketing, but nowadays marketing is a very interdisciplinary field that absorbs knowledge from different fields — psychology, economics, sociology, statistics, and computer science. It’s much more complicated than sales alone.”

For his master’s thesis, Wu was helped by UNLV marketing professor Anjala Krishen, who advised him in the research.

“She completely opened my eyes to the fact that there is much more I can do and there’s much more I needed to learn," Wu said. "At the same time, I was doing an MIS (management and information systems) certificate, and I got to know (professor) Greg Moody who is also a great researcher. Both Anjala and Greg made a big impact in changing my way of thinking, changing my way of doing research, and then they successfully convinced me to pursue my Ph.D. to get more advanced training in terms of research.”