Timothy Moon-Yew Chan is a Founder Professor in the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He was formerly Professor and University Research Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada.
He graduated with BA (summa cum laude) from Rice University in 1992, and completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at UBC in 1995 at the age of 19. His late mother, Miu Yung Chan, was a molecular physicist with Ph.D. from the Ohio State University.
He was awarded the Governor General's Gold Medal (as Head of Graduating Class in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of British Columbia during convocation), the NSERC doctoral prize, and the Premier's Research Excellence Award (PREA) of Ontario, Canada.
He is currently an associate editor for the ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG), SIAM Journal on Computing (SICOMP), and the International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications. He is also a member of the editorial board of Algorithmica,Discrete and Computational Geometry, as well as Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications.