Chang Sun (C.)

Chang Sun is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University. Her research interests cover privacy-preserving distributed data mining, federated/distributed machine learning, synthetic data generation, decentralized personal health data management, health data sharing, management and analysis, personal knowledge graphs, and linked data.

She used data science technologies (e.g., deep learning models, federated machine learning models, GANS) to solve research challenges in health domains such as diabetes, rare diseases (Leukemia), cardiovascular diseases, and sleeping disorders, and also in social sciences.

Chang is motivated to collaborate with researchers across different organizations, backgrounds, and domains. She has led and participated in multiple national (Dutch) and international programs such as NWO-VWData (Responsible Value Creation with Big Data, https://www.nwo.nl/en/projects/40017605), ODISSEI (Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations, https://odissei-data.nl/en/), DiTECT (https://ditect.eu/), CMyGuideline (https://www.cmylife.nl/projecten/cmyguideline), and REALM Project (https://realm-ai.eu/). She is also a member of EU COST Action Distributed Knowledge Graph Group organizing several workshops and hackathons since 2022. 

Chang is highly motivated to achieve her research goal which is to find ways to balance the emerging importance of responsible data practices with the social and scientific value of research. She attaches great importance to communicating her scientific outcomes not only to the academic community but also to the general public by presenting at conferences and in public media. She is passionate about supporting females and junior researchers in the Data Science domain and inspiring the young generations to enter the field. She has organized three editions of Women in Data Science (WIDS) Maastricht events (https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/events/wids-maastricht-datathon-2022) since 2020 as a WIDS Ambassador. She is also a project leader of the Data Scientist MINDSETS Podcast (https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/data-scientist-mindsets-podcast) which aims to promote diversity and inclusivity in data science. (Podcast recordings: https://maastrichtuniversity.bbvms.com/ch/433.html).

Chang obtained her bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering at Shanghai Maritime University. Then, she achieved her Master Degree in Artificial Intelligence at Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering of Maastricht University. She completed her internship at Center of Big Data Statistics of Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (Statistics Netherlands) about Classification of Twitter Accounts.