Our Members

Prof Tony F Chan assumed the presidency of King Abdullah University of Science of Technolog (KAUST) on 1 September 2018. From 2009-2018, Prof Chan was the President of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.  From 2006-2009, Prof Chan was Assistant Director of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which is the largest directorate at NSF. In that position, he guided and managed research funding in astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematical science, material science, and multidisciplinary activities.

Prof Chan’s scientific background is in Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering. He received his BS and MS degrees in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. He pursued postdoctoral research at Caltech as Research Fellow, and taught Computer Science at Yale University before joining the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as Professor of Mathematics in 1986. He was appointed Chair of the Department of Mathematics in 1997 and served as Dean of Physical Sciences from 2001 to 2006. He also holds honorary joint appointments with the University’s BioEngineering Department and the Computer Science Department.

Prof Chan was one of the principal investigators who made the successful proposal to the NSF to form the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA. He served as IPAM’s Director from 2000 to 2001.

Prof Chan is an active member of many scientific societies. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), an elected fellow of both the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Mathematical Society. Professor Chan has served on the editorial boards of many journals in mathematics and computing, including SIAM Review, SIAM Journal of Scientific Computing, and the Asian Journal of Mathematics, and is one of the three Editors-in-Chief of Numerische Mathematik. He co-wrote the proposal to start a new SIAM Journal of Imaging Sciences and serves on its inaugural editorial board till 2012. He formerly served on the NSF Mathematical and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee and the US National Committee for Mathematics, and was one of five US representatives to the General Assembly of the International Union of Mathematicians in 2006.

Prof Chan is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, President’s Advisory Council of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Scientific Advisory Board of the University of Vienna, and the United States Committee of 100. Prof Chan is also a member of the Advisory Committee on Innovation and Technology of the Hong Kong Government. He was a member of the Selection Committee for the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences in 2012 and 2013.

Prof Chan’s research interests include mathematical image processing and computer vision, Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) physical design and computational brain mapping. He has published over 200 refereed papers and was one of the most cited mathematicians in the world. He has mentored over 35 PhD students and 25 postdoctoral fellows.

Website of Prof Tony Chan at King Abdullah University of Science of Technology

December 2021

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