[1] He also holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington,[2] serves on the Board of Directors for ResMed (NYSE: RMD, ASX: RMD),[3] is senior advisor and chief technologist for Seattle-based life science incubator IntuitiveX,[4] advises multiple startup companies (e.g. Proprio Vision[5]), and is an active startup and real estate investor.

[9] He was also named one of SciFi Channel's Young Visionaries at TED 2009, as well as Forbes' Revolutionaries: Radical Thinkers and their World-Changing Ideas for his work on Whole Body Computing.

He moved to the United States for high school and received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1996.

He later attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his PhD in Computer Science in 2004 under the supervision of Randy Pausch, popularly known for delivering "The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

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.