His parents, Samuel Chan and Rena Ling, both play instruments, and his mother is a pianist and alumnus of the Juilliard School.

His sister, J. Clara Chan, is a violist in the Barnard College Manhattan School of Music Exchange Program.

[5] Chan went to Crocker Middle School in Hillsborough, CA, where he joined the band and learned to play the alto saxophone.

Chan attended Columbia University as a student of the Columbia-Juilliard Exchange Program, where he studied with Richard Aaron.

Chan is also a co-founder of the cello ensemble String Theory at Columbia University, with whom he traveled to Arizona to perform at Google’s 2013 Zeitgeist conference.