He is the Joan and Sandy Weill Chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco and Jeanne Robertson Distinguished Professor.
In 2020, Chang was elected into the National Academy of Medicine[1] for “deciphering the functional blueprint of speech in the human cerebral cortex, pioneering advanced clinical methods for human brain mapping and spearheading novel translational neuroprosthetic technology for paralyzed patients.”[2][3] Chang attended medical school at UCSF, where he also did a predoctoral fellowship on auditory cortex neurophysiology with Professor Michael Merzenich.
He later did his neurosurgery residency at UCSF and trained under the mentorship of Dr. Mitchel Berger for brain tumors, Dr. Nicholas Barbaro for epilepsy, and Dr. Michael Lawton for vascular disorders.
[5] Chang pioneered the use of high-density direct electrophysiological recordings from cortex, which enabled him and colleagues to determine the selective tuning of cortical neurons to specific acoustic and phonetic features in consonants and vowels.
[20] Chang's team applied their discoveries on speech control to develop new neuroprosthetic technology designed to restore communication to patients who have lost the ability to speak.
[21] In 2021, as part of the BRAVO clinical trial, the team demonstrated the first successful decoding of full words and sentences from the brain activity of a man who was severely paralyzed after brainstem stroke and could not speak for over 15 years.
From 2014-2019, Chang led a multi-institutional project in the US BRAIN Initiative, which focused on developing new medical device technology to treat severe refractory neuropsychiatric conditions.