Professor Soon Ae Chun of CUNY Staten Island passed away in September 2025. 

Among her many amazing achievements was that she was the founding editor of the ACM Digital Government Journal.  Below I am reproducing the obituary (in press) written by her co-editors.

Prof. Soon Ae Chun (1960 - 2025)

It is with profound sadness that we share the news of the passing of our remarkable colleague, Dr. Soon Ae Chun.

This past September, we lost a visionary scholar, a dedicated educator, a transformative leader, and a dear friend in the field of digital government and information systems research. Dr. Chun was a professor and director of the Information Systems and Informatics program at the College of Staten Island, part of the City University of New York. She also held faculty positions in the Computer Science PhD and Data Science MS programs at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her leadership extended beyond the classroom and into the realm of cutting-edge research, where she directed the iSecure Lab, a National Science Foundation-sponsored initiative focused on cybersecurity and information assurance.  

Dr. Chun’s research spanned a wide array of critical and emerging topics: cybersecurity, semantic web technologies, social data analytics, and smart city policy. Her work, supported by NSF, NOAA, and state agencies, resulted in over 120 publications in top-tier journals and conferences. Her contributions significantly advanced our understanding of data integration, privacy, and the role of technology in governance. Starting with a more technical research agenda, she successfully moved to the transdisciplinary domain by bringing together various disciplines and practices. Her personality was able to bring these areas together and look forward to the future.

The Digital Government community particularly benefited from her leadership and more than 2 decades of service through the Digital Government Society (DGS). She served as a Board member and both as Program Chair and Conference Chair of the Annual Digital Government Research Conference (dg.o). She was also President of DGS from 2016 to 2017. After her presidency, she reinvented herself once again and launched a new journal, ACM Digital Government: Research and Practice (DGov). She was pivotal in developing DGov as an international journal accepted by peers as having a high reputation. Most recently, she was appointed Co-Editor-in-Chief of Government Information Quarterly, the leading journal in Digital Government Research. Through these and many other roles, she helped shape the development and future of digital governance research.

Soon had a way of connecting with everyone-making each person feel seen and valued. She always offered the most welcoming encouragement with grace and sincerity to PhD students and junior faculty. She cared deeply about scholarship, but even more so about people and community. We will miss her deeply. She will be deeply missed, but her impact will continue to resonate for generations to come.  

BETH NOVECK, The Governance Lab, New York University, New York City, United States

MARIJN JANSSEN, Faculty of Technology, Policy & Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft,

Netherlands

JING ZHANG, Graduate School of Management, Clark University, Worcester, United States

YU-CHE CHEN, School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, United States

SEHL MELLOULI, Laval University, Quebec City, Canada

LUIS FELIPE LUNA-REYES, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, Albany,

United States and School of Business, Universidad de las Americas Puebla, San Andres Cholula, Mexico

This message came from a former student of Soon:

Thank you so much for your response to the email I sent Soon. I was so devastated to hear the news and more so that I didn't have a chance to pay my respects and tell her how grateful I am to her for her mentorship and guidance. She meant so much to me beyond a research mentor. She took me under her wing when she really didn't have to and continuously showed me kindness above and beyond what's expected of a professor. She is and will always be my role model for who and what I want to be in academia and my gratitude and respect for her truly know no bounds. I'm going to miss her. 

Wishing you only good things,

Tammy

This message was received from Soon's Work Place:

A Message of Condolence from the Lucille and Jay Chazanoff School of Business 

On behalf of the entire Lucille and Jay Chazanoff School of Business community, I would like to express my heartfelt sympathy to you and your family on the passing of Soon.  I can tell you that our faculty and staff are deeply saddened and reeling after learning the news this afternoon.  Soon was a long-time member of our evolving school community, helping us build from a business department in the Division of Humanities & Social Science to a named School of Business.  She was a tremendous colleague — scholar, researcher, teacher, mentor, author, editor, friend, and so much more. 

Below is the text from Soon's CUNY Home Page. Unfortunately a big part was already removed by CUNY. But this is what still exists as of today. But see below for what could be recovered.

Soon Ae Chun is a professor and director of Information Systems and Informatics program at College of Staten Island (CSI) and a doctoral faculty member of Computer Science at the Graduate Center (GC) of the City University of New York. She is the director of the Information Security Research and Education Lab (iSecure Lab) sponsored by NSF. She is the recipient of the Fulbright Senior Scholarship and the CSI President's Dolphin Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement. She served as the President for the Digital Government Society . She was a visiting scholar at Seoul National University and Columbia University Network Security Lab. She is a research fellow at CIMIC Rutgers University.

Dr. Chun's research interests include Security and Privacy, Semantic Web, Data and Process Integration, Social Data Analytics and Workflow. Dr. Chun's current research projects include the policy issues in the smart cities, the development of a cyber security ontology and a Linked Data of multi-modal cybersecurity educational data, and research on social data integration and analytics in the Healthcare domain. Her research has been sponsored by NSF, NOAA and New Jersey State Agency and CUNY PSC.

Her research has been published in Journal of Computer Security, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, International Journal of Inforamtion and Computer Security, Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases, Governent Information Quarterly and many other journals and conferences.

She serves as an editorial board member for many journals, and serves as a reviewer for numerous journals, conferences, and proposals. Dr. Chun has served as an organization member for many international conferences, including the general chair and program chair at Int. Conference of the Digital Government Research (dg.o), the IFIP conference of Database and Applications Security and Privacy (DBSec) and a track chair of the Semantic Web Applications at ACM Symposium of Applied Computing (ACM-SAC).

She is a senior member of IEEE Computer Society, a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Digital Government Society, AIS, and the Beta Gamma Sigma National Business Honor Society.

Scholarship and Publications

Professor Chun has published in security and database journals, such as Journal of Computer Security, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases, as well as data science and applied informatics journals, such as Journal of Information Sciences, Government Information Quarterly, Information Polity, IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience, and Transportation Research.  She has published over 120 papers, in journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters, as well as several edited several journal special issues and conference proceedings. For the full list, visit  

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=mE0JBT0AAAAJ

https://dblp.org/pid/c/SoonAeChun.html

We Miss Her

Thanks to the miracle of the Web Archive at https://web.archive.org/ I was able to recover another page:

Dr. Soon Ae Chun

City University of New York

College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center

• Professor & Director Info Systems and Informatics, at the College of Staten Island

• Professor, Computer Science PhD Program , Data Science MS Program at the Graduate Center,

• Director, iSecure Lab

• Founding Editor-In-Chief, ACM Digital Government Research and Practice (2018-)
  
  

• Visiting Professor, The GovLab, New York University (2019-2020)

• Fulbright Scholar, GSPA, Seoul National University (2018)

• President, Digital Government Society (2016-2017)

• Research Fellow, I-DSLA & CIMIC, Rutgers University (2013-2020)

• Visiting Scholar, Network Security Lab, Columbia University (2012-2013)

• Senior Member, ACM and IEEE

Contact Information

CUNY-College of Staten Island

Information Systems and Informatics, 3N-210

2800 Victory Blvd, Staten Island, NY 10314 ( map)

718-982-2931, 718-982-2920(msg), 718-982-2965(fax),

Gmail: soonaechun at gmail or soon.chun@csi.cuny.edu

CUNY-Graduate Center

Computer Science Department, Rm 4411

365 5th Ave, New York, NY

212-817-8391, 212-817-8190(msg) 212-817-1510(fax)