Chang was an undergraduate at Harvard, obtained his PhD at The Scripps Research Institute, and was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. In 2013, he started his independent group at UC Irvine, where he was Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Molecular Biology & Biochemistry, Director of the Centre for Synthetic Biology, and Director of the Engineering + Health Institute. Chang’s group is best known for developing orthogonal DNA replication, a genetic architecture that achieves durable continuous mutation and evolution of target genes in vivo.  His group has established the principles for orthogonal replication and has used it to accelerate the evolution of genes and biomolecules towards new function at scale in yeast. Chang’s group has also built genetic systems that act as molecular recorders of transient information in mammalian cells, which may be used to track cancer or animal development. He was awarded the UC Regents Innovation Award for Disruptive Research in 2026.

At GBI, Chang will head the Division of Biomolecular and Cellular Engineering where he seeks to map the relationship between biomolecular sequence and function and to understand how sequence-function landscapes can be effectively searched by evolution and AI. This fundamental goal will involve scaling accelerated evolution to generate strategic evolutionary outcomes and data, machine learning, protein design, and experimental efforts to probe the density of function in sequence space across many contexts. Several applications deriving from this fundamental goal, including therapeutic antibody and enzyme engineering and the invention of valuable biotechnologies, will be prioritised.