A graduate of the University of Chicago, Huang began his career with the study of the continuous absorption coefficients of two-electron systems, but eventually his research focus turned to the study of stellar atmospheres, radiative transfer, and binary and multiple star systems.
In subsequent years, Huang began to cover the topic of life on extrasolar planets and the prerequisites thereof, coining the term "habitable zone" to refer to the region around a star where planets could support liquid water at their surfaces at a 1959 conference of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
After teaching astronomy at that institution for the two following years, Huang became an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, a position he stayed in before moving to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1959.
Concurrent with his Goddard position, Huang was a member of Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1960 to 1961, then a professor of astrophysics at the Catholic University of America from 1963 to 1964.
[2] Two years after his death, the then newly discovered main-belt asteroid 3014 Huangsushu was named in his honor.