Prof. Chan Lai-wan received her degrees of BA, MA and PhD in Engineering from the Cambridge University in England. She was a recipient of the Prince Philip Scholarship and the King’s College Studentship. She worked in the Speech, Vision and Robotics Group in Information Engineering led by the late Prof. Frank Fallside, who introduced neural networks to her when others were skeptical of this approach. She is now a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and is concurrently serving as the associate dean (education) in the Faculty of Engineering of CUHK.

Her research interest is in the modeling of neural networks and the techniques in data mining. Applications are in time series analysis, image analysis and recognition, financial engineering and bioinformatics, including portfolio management, risk analysis, and gene expression data analysis etc. Over the years, although many new research results have been published and new applications have been made, she is still working towards the goal of finding how human and computers discover knowledge from data. She has co-edited a number of books and has published well over 100 referenced journal and conference papers.