Chiao-Ling Chien is a researcher and data analyst on tertiary education at the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

She has co-authored UNESCO reports on the subject of academic mobility and higher education, including Cross-Border Student Mobility: the Changing Global Landscape and Global Education Digest.

She is a doctoral candidate in the Higher Education programme at University of Minnesota, and the recipient of fellowships for international and national data policy training awarded by the Association for Institutional Research, the National Science Foundation, and the National Center for Education Statistics in the US.