She did her doctoral work at University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Robin Hartshorne and was awarded her PhD in 1982.

[1] After finishing her doctoral studies, Dr. Chang was appointed a Bateman Research Instructor at the California Institute of Technology.

Prof. Chang has held visiting positions in Sweden, Korea, and Italy, at the IHES in Paris, and the IAS in Princeton, as well at several institutions in the US.

[4] The citation reads "For contributions to arithmetic combinatorics, analytic number theory, and algebraic geometry."

In 2009 she was chosen to give a plenary address at the 9th International Conference on Finite Fields and Applications, which was held in Dublin, Ireland.