Dr. Tan received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in automatic control from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China,  in 1995, 1998, respectively,  and his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland in 2002. From September 2002 to July 2004, he was a Research Associate with the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) at the University of Maryland. In August 2004 he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State University as an Assistant Professor, and founded the Smart Microsystems Laboratory, which he has been directing since. He has been an Associate Professor at MSU since July 2010. His research interests include electroactive polymer sensors and actuators, modeling and control of smart materials, aquatic robotics, and adaptive autonomous cyber-physical systems.  

Dr. Tan's research has been supported by NSF, ONR, and other agencies and organizations. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2006, the 2008 ASME DSCD Best Mechatronics Paper Award (with Yang Fang) in 2009, and the MSU Teacher-Scholar Award in 2010. He has been an Associate Editor of Automatica since 2008.  He was a member of the IEEE Control System Society Conference Editorial Board from 2007 to 2010. He was a guest editor of IEEE Control Systems Magazine for its February 2009 issue's special section on modeling and control of hysteresis. He has served on the organizing or program committees for a number of international conferences, and is serving as the Program Chair for the 15th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR'2011). Dr. Tan is also keen to integrate his research with educational and outreach activities, and leads an NSF-funded Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Site on Bio-Inspired Technology and Systems at MSU. 

Dr. Tan's full curriculum vitae