Desney Tan is vice president and managing director of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

Health Futures, a cross-organizational incubation group that serves as Microsoft's Health and Life Science "moonshot factory". He also holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

, serves on the Board of Directors for

ResMed ResMed Inc. is a San Diego, California-based medical equipment company. It primarily provides cloud-connectable medical devices for the treatment of sleep apnea (such as CPAP devices and masks), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and o ...

(, ), is senior advisor and chief technologist for Seattle-based life science incubator IntuitiveX, advises multiple startup companies (e.g. Proprio Vision), and is an active startup and real estate investor. Tan was recipient of a National Science and Technology Board Fellowship in 2001, an Agency for Science, Technology, and Research Fellowship in 2002, and a Microsoft Research Fellowship in 2003. He was honored as one of MIT Technology Review's 2007 Young Innovators Under 35 ( TR35) in 2007 for his work on Brain Computer Interfaces. He was also named one of SciFi Channel's Young Visionaries at

TED TED may refer to: Economics and finance * TED spread between U.S. Treasuries and Eurodollar Education * ''Türk Eğitim Derneği'', the Turkish Education Association ** TED Ankara College Foundation Schools, Turkey ** Transvaal Education Depa ...

2009, as well as Forbes' Revolutionaries: Radical Thinkers and their World-Changing Ideas for his work on Whole Body Computing. He was the Technical Program Chair of the prestigious ACM SIGCHI Conference in 2008 and General Chair in 2011. His research interests primarily focus on Human-Computer Interaction, Physiological Computing, and Healthcare.

Biography

Tan was born and grew up in the Republic of Singapore. He moved to the United States for high school and received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the

University of Notre Dame The University of Notre Dame du Lac, known simply as Notre Dame ( ) or ND, is a private Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, outside the city of South Bend. French priest Edward Sorin founded the school in 1842. The main campu ...

in 1996. He then spent time in the Singapore Armed Forces. He later attended

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

, where he earned his PhD in Computer Science in 2004 under the supervision of

Randy Pausch Randolph Frederick Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American educator, a professor of computer science, human–computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pausch learn ...

, popularly known for delivering "The Last Lecture:

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" (also called "The Last Lecture") was a lecture given by Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Randy Pausch on September 18, 2007, that received widespread media coverage, and was the basis ...

" after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

Work

Tan began his academic career working on robotic path planning, and eventually moved into augmented and virtual reality as well as large display and multiple device user experiences. His PhD dissertation demonstrated the cognitive and social effects of display size, irrespective of the field of view. He is perhaps most well known for his work utilizing bio-sensing to create novel forms of human-computer interfaces. This includes work on: brain-computer interfaces, muscle-computer interfaces, tongue-computer interfaces, bio-acoustic sensing (e.g. in the Skinput project), using the body as an antenna (e.g. in the Humantenna project), as well as work on bionic contact lenses. More recently, he has led partnerships with enterprises like Adaptive Biotechnologies (seeking to develop a universal blood-based diagnostic) as well as

Verily Life Sciences Verily Life Sciences, also known as Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences), is Alphabet Inc.'s research organization devoted to the study of life sciences. The organization was formerly a division of Google X, until August 10, 2015, when Sergey ...

and the

Broad Institute The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (IPA: , pronunciation respelling: ), often referred to as the Broad Institute, is a biomedical and genomic research center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U ...

(to develop and deploy the Terra.bio platform). Tan has published over 100 technical papers in various domains, and holds more than 100 associated patents.Desney Tan - Google Scholar
Retrieved on 2021-02-12.

References

External links

Desney Tan's Professional Homepage at Microsoft Research

Desney Tan's webpage at the University of Washington

Desney Tan's LinkedIn Profile
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Tan, Desney Human–computer interaction researchers Carnegie Mellon University alumni University of Notre Dame alumni Living people 1976 births Singaporean emigrants to the United States Singaporean people of Chinese descent Date of birth missing (living people)