Zixin Nie

Zixin Nie is a data privacy specialist for RTI. With an educational background in physics and statistics, he helps establish, teach and enforce policies and practices geared toward maintaining compliance with regional and global data protection and privacy regulations. Mr. Nie evaluates systems for data risk and impact, assesses technologies geared toward enhancing privacy, performs record-linkage tasks, and trains staff on a range of data privacy topics. He is also known for his expertise in de-identification, specifically using methods that are statistically and scientifically accepted for work with data sets of all sizes. Mr. Nie’s expertise is critical for conducting statistical measures of re-identification risk as well as building custom de-identification solutions for organizations looking to harness the value of their data.

Currently, Mr. Nie is co-director and principal lead on RTI’s ADC Privacy Preserving Technologies (PPTs) Phase 1 environmental scan. His duties on the project include applying agile scrum principles as the scrum master, conducting research of PPTs, and identifying technologies and their practitioners for engagement. He also hosts and moderates discussion panels and synthesizes essential findings into reports that help inform future projects and the development of a National Secure Data Service.

Mr. Nie is also providing key guidance on data de-identification and privacy-preserving record linkage for the BioData Catalyst Data Management Core (BDC DMC). Part of the acceleration project, his work is enabling the BDC platform to ingest and share data for secondary use. He is creating a customized de-identification strategy for imaging data, to be deployed for all imaging data ingested by the BDC system. Mr. Nie is also building a tailored privacy-preserving record linkage solution for researchers using the BDC platform, so they can link to de-identified datasets.

Mr. Nie is also a data steward for the Helping End Addiction Long-Term (HEAL) Initiative, where he assists investigators with finding the right data repository that meets the needs of their data types, transformation of their data so that they become interoperable and linkable with other HEAL datasets, addressing key concerns such as data sensitivity and data privacy of human data subjects. His work helps investigators navigate the data privacy requirements that come with sharing research data, such as de-identification requirements.

Before joining RTI, Mr. Nie led the development of data privacy solutions at IQVIA from 2019-2023. There, he helped clients within the healthcare, advertising, and technology industries, enabling them to gather, analyze and share their data in a privacy-protected manner. From 2016-2019, Mr. Nie led the development of multiple functionalities within generalized systems for Statistics Canada, acting as liaison between clients, programmers, and businesses to ensure product satisfaction.

In addition to his work, Mr. Nie is a Certified Information Privacy Professional - United States (CIPP/US), member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) and fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese.