J.C. Huang was born in 1935 in Taiwan, where he finished his undergraduate education in electrical engineering, served in the air force obligatorily as a second lieutenant armament officer for one and one half years, and then worked for the government-owned international telecommunication company as an engineer until he left his motherland for the United States in December, 1960.
He received his master degree in May, 1962, from Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, and went to work for Western Electric Company (now Lucent Technologies) in Allentown, Pennsylvania, as an engineer, where his main responsibility was in the development and design of test equipment for the integrated circuits used in the AT&T's first electronic telephone switching system.
In the fall of 1966, he went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to complete his advanced graduate study. There, in the three years that followed, he got married, saw the birth of his first son, and received his Ph.D. degree.
Immediately after receiving his Ph.D. degree in May 1969, he joined the faculty of computer science at the University of Houston as an assistant professor. He became an associated professor in 1973, and a full professor in 1980.
He did his dissertation work in switching and automata theory. After he came to the University of Houston, he briefly became interested in database systems and high-performance computing as the result of his association with the remote-sensing program at NASA. His summer experience at Johnson Space Center in mid 70's, however, turned his attention more lastingly to the problem of how to determine if a given software system will do what it is intended to do. He has since devoted most of his research efforts on this problem. His 1975 paper on ACM Computing Survey, titled "An Approach to Program Testing," is one of the most frequently cited works on the subject for more than a decade. He has published many papers and conducted a number of seminars and short courses on the subject nationally and internationally.
His major practical experience in computer software includes serving as the chief architect of a software validation system for the U. S. Army Ballistic Missile Defense Command in the early 80's, and as a senior consultant to the Naval Underwater System Center on nuclear submarine software problems in the late 80's.
J.C. Huang served as the department chair from 1992 to 1996, a period of time marked by increasingly scarce resources and an upper administration in constant upheaval. In four difficult years, he was able to neutralize threatening forces from the without, to make the first chaired professor in the department a reality, to develop a sizable constant source of funds for improving departmental computing facilities, and to increase the department annual external research funding from approximately two hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million in 1996.
After returned to his regular teaching position, he devoted himself pursuing his interrupted research in program analysis and testing that culminated in two publications: a research monograph titled Path-Oriented Program Analysis (published by Cambridge University Press in December 2007), and a professional reference book and graduate-level textbook titled Software Error-Detection through Testing and Analysis (published by Wiley in June 2009).
He retired and became a professor emeritus on September 1, 2007, concluding his 38 years of active service as a faculty member at the University of Houston.