Tan Tin Wee

Dr Tan has more than 30 years of experience in academia, the biomedical, Internet technology and bioinformatics sectors.

Dr Tan is currently the founding Chief Executive of the National Supercomputing Centre of Singapore (NSCC). He is on secondment from the Department of Biochemistry at the National University of Singapore where he has been carrying out bioinformatics research for the past 30 years. He has recently built a national petascale supercomputer for the past five years and elevated the NSCC into a national computing platform funded by the National Research Infrastructure programme of the National Research Foundation of Singapore. As Chairman of the A*STAR Computational Resource Centre, he inspired his team to establish gloal connectivity using the InfiniBand protocol, initiated the global supercomputing testbeds InfiniCortex and InfiniCloud, projects which the team won nearly half a dozen awards. He has founded the SupercomputingAsia conference series, which is Asia's leading supercomputing conference.

As an advisor to Barramundi Asia, he helped them produce a fish vaccine, and as a Singapore-headquartered international fish farm, it is looking forward to a listing. As board director of an Adtech company, Knorex Pte Ltd, he is also invested in helping them succeed in a highly competitive industry. In his bioinformatics work, his team developed a machine learning system for predicting influenza virus tropism and pioneered various bioinformatics databases.

For the past 20 years, he has been involved widely in the information and communication technology sector. For his wide-ranging industry contributions in the Internet, he was inducted into the World Technology Network in 2000 and the prestigious inaugural Internet Hall of Fame in 2012 together with Internet pioneers such as Vint Cerf ("father" of the Internet), Tim Berners-Lee (investor of the Web), Al Gore (former Vice President of USA).

Besides pioneering key Internet technologies in Singapore in the 1990s, from Gopher, Web, multilingual Internet, Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), multicasting, Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs), internationalised domain names, his achievements included the founding and board leadership of many international, regional and national organisations including the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium and the International Forum for IT in Tamil, where he has been a key pioneer of the Internationalised Domain Name system of the Internet. He led as Chairman of the Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG), founding member of the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) founded in 1996, and founded other Internet organisations such as Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SINGAREN) in 1997.

In the 90s until recently, as a bioinformatics pioneer, he was also founder of the Singapore Bioinformatics Centre (BIC), Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet), and nurtured the International Conference on Bioinformatics for 15 years. He has served on the board of the International Society for Computational Biology for ten years (ISCB) and Association for Medical and Bioinformatics Singapore, where he has promoted education in Internet and bioinformatics technologies respectively. He was also an early pioneer in 2000s of free online bioinformatics education including online problem-based learning in the S* Alliance. He has been accorded numerous awards for these contributions.

In the entrepreneurial and corporate realm, he has been involved in a number of university spin-offs including Pacific Internet, I-DNS.net International, and during his 14 year term as board member of Keppel Telecommunications and Transportation (KT&T), overseen the IPO of M1 (B2F.SI) and Keppel Data Centre REIT (AJBU.SI).

As an educator, he has served as Master of Eusoff Hall and Fellow of Sheares Hall of Residence at the National University of Singapore as well as non-Resident Fellow of Eusoff College and Sub-Warden of Kitchener House, Edinburgh University, over a span of more than 25 years. As an academic, he has published more than 150 journal and conference papers and books, with an H-index of 32 and taught biochemistry, molecular biology and bioinformatics for more than 20 years.

In community service, he also pioneered the introduction of the Internet for various disability communities in the 1990s, including the Singapore School for the Deaf, and the Visually Handicapped. He served on the VWO Capabilities Fund panel of the National Council of Social Service for many years.

Dr Tan also previously served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Eu Yan Sang International Ltd, and as Focal Point of the ASEAN SubCommittee on Biotechnology (SCB), and ASEAN SubCommittee on Infrastructure and Resource Development (SCIRD). For his decades of service, he was awarded the ASEAN COST Meritorious Service Award. He is currently serving on the Board of Advisors to the ASEAN Committee on Science Technology and Innovation (BAC), as well as the ASEAN HPC key opinion leaders forum. Dr Tan was an academic advisory board member for Nanyang Polytechnic and is now Chairman of the Academic Advisory Committee and Senate Member of the Management Development Institute of Singapore (MDIS) having served more than a decade.

Dr Tan holds a Bachelor of Arts (Natural Sciences) from Trinity College (1985), University of Cambridge, a Masters in Applied Molecular Biology and Biotechnology from University College London (1986) under the Trinity College Traveling Studentship award and a Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Medicine from the University of Edinburgh (1990) under the UK Overseas Research Award.