Calyn Tan is a Public Health Medicine Specialist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Ministry of Health Malaysia, working at the intersection of data, equity, and storytelling. She leads the Repository Unit within the Sector for Biostatistics and Data Repository, where she oversees the strategic planning, development, and governance of health research data repositories. 

A turning point in Calyn’s equity journey came in 2016 during her public health studies, when she began to understand health as an interconnected web shaped by social determinants. Her work focuses on building end-to-end pathways that transform data into meaningful insights while ensuring equitable access, responsible governance, and ethical use to support fair, evidence-based policy and decision-making.

At the national level, Calyn led the development of Malaysia’s Guidelines on Patient Registry Establishment and Implementation, which were adopted as the national standard for clinical registries within the Ministry of Health. This initiative helped address long-standing fragmentation in how health data are generated, governed, and used, advancing ethical standards, interoperability, and patient-centered design. As Secretary of the MOH Registry Data and Information Governance Committee (2024 till current), she convenes diverse stakeholders to co-create governance frameworks, ethical pathways, and best-practice standards that embed fairness, accountability, and sustainability into registry systems.

Calyn is currently driving the creation of a National Health Research Data Repository Ecosystem and contributing to the development of a Trusted Research Environment platform, building on her previous work developing a big data analytics dashboard to strengthen evidence-informed decision-making. Beyond her scientific work, she draws on photography, writing, and film to humanize data and advocate for equity, earning recognition including a Lancet Photography Highlight Award and national creative prizes. As her work evolves, Calyn aims to strengthen Malaysia’s trusted, inclusive data infrastructure and expand storytelling-driven advocacy, so evidence translates into policies that reduce inequities and improve lives.