[2] She studied biomedical engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, graduating in 1986, and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate study in electrical engineering and computer science.
[1] As well as her position in electrical engineering and computer science at Purdue, Tan holds courtesy appointments in Purdue's departments of mechanical engineering and psychological sciences.
[4] She has taken leaves from Purdue to head the Human Computer Interaction Group at Microsoft Research Asia,[2] to take a professorship in psychology at Beijing Normal University, and to work as lead haptics scientist for Google.
[4] Tan's research has included the development of chairs that can sense the posture of people sitting in them,[5] and wearable devices that can translate spoken language into vibrations that can be felt on the skin, as a way of making speech accessible to hearing-impaired people.
[6] Tan was named an IEEE Fellow in 2017, "for contributions to wearable haptics".