Alice Chang was born in Xi’an, China. She grew up in Taiwan and received her bachelor degree at the National Taiwan University in 1970. She moved to the US and received her PhD degree in mathematics at the University of California in 1974.

Since then, she has taught at various universities in the US, including UCLA (1981–1998) and UC Berkeley (1989–1991). She became a Professor in Mathematics at Princeton University in 1999. She is a recipient of Sloan Fellow and Guggenheim Fellow and was a plenary talk speaker at the International Congress of Mathematics at Beijing, 2002, Noether lecture at Rio, Brazil in 2018. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2008, and (US) National Academy of Science in 2009.

In her thesis and early stage of her career, her research concentrates on problems in classical harmonic analysis. In recent years, her research interests are in geometric analysis and conformal geometry. She is involved in a project applying PDE methods to classify a class of manifolds of dimension four via conformal invariants.