Jiancai Liao joined Birmingham Business School as an Assistant Professor in Marketing in 2025. He received his PhD in Marketing from Aalto University School of Business (Finland). During his doctoral studies, Jiancai held visiting positions at Virginia Tech (USA) and City University of Hong Kong. He is also serving as a Visiting Scholar at the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR) at Stanford University, a prestigious transatlantic platform fostering advanced inquiry in organizational social science.
Jiancai’s research centres on healthcare services, AI in services, and platform-based services, with ongoing projects related to the impact of digitalization on consumer behavior, healthcare policy, health behavior, and consumer well-being. Methodologically, he combines experiments, empirical modelling, meta-analysis, and qualitative methods. His work has been published in journals such as Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, and Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, and he has several projects under review at leading journals in marketing and other business fields.
Jiancai’s has secured multiple competitive research grants as a principal investigator from organisations including the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, the Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, the Paulo Foundation, the Matti Lehti Fund, and the Foundation for Economic Education.
In terms of teaching, Jiancai has experience across undergraduate and postgraduate levels, covering consumer psychology, digital marketing, and digitalisation of markets and consumption. He is particularly interested in leveraging AI to enhance student learning and employability.