Dr Mary Chan is presently a professor at the School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at the Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU Singapore). Her main research interests are in polymers in nanoscience and biotechnology. She has published extensively, with more than 180 papers in top-tier journals such as Nature Materials, Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, JACS, Small, Biomaterials, etc. In the area of biomedical polymers, her group has recently developed a novel class of highly effective broad spectrum antimicrobial coatings which are non-toxic and biocompatible. Her work in carbon nanotubes focuses mainly on metallicity-based selection of single-walled carbon nanotubes, solution-based alignment of SWNTs and nanotube-based composites.
Dr. Chan contributes actively to the industry and sits on a number of committees and boards. She has recently been elected to being a Fellow of the America Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. She is also a member of several editorial boards of journals, incl. the American Chemical Society Applied Materials and Interfaces Journal. Dr. Chan was the Acting Chair of the School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at NTU from 2011-2013. She was also a pioneer of the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering degree program and the founding Associate Chair (Research & Graduate Studies) and Associate Chair (Research and External Relations) of the new School from 2005-2010 and 2010-2011 respectively.
She was formerly a senior technical manager in Sipix Imaging (CA, USA, now part of E-ink) working on e-paper before joining NTU in 2001. She obtained her BEng (Chem) and PhD (polymers) from the National University of Singapore and MIT in 1986 and 1993, respectively.