Yikun is an Assistant Professor at the Mitch Daniels School of Business at Purdue University. Her research focuses on understanding individuals' decisions on digital platforms to inform platform strategies. She combines the design and implementation of large-scale field experiments, causal inference, structural modeling, machine learning, and the analysis of unstructured data to answer research questions.

Yikun completed a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to doctoral studies at Berkeley, she completed a bachelor's degree at McGill University and spent one year as a Ph.D. student in Quantitative Marketing at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.