Professor Tay Yong Chiang

Professor Tay received his BSc (Hons) in Mathematics from the University of Singapore, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. At Harvard, he was a member of the Senior Common Room and, later, a Resident Fellow at Lowell House.

After graduation, he worked for a start-up called Sequioa that was building a parallel transaction processing machine. Life in industry was not very interesting, so he returned from Boston to join the National University of Singapore, where he is now a professor in the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science.

His research interest is mostly in performance modelling, i.e. writing equations to describe the behaviour of a computer system. He has received several teaching awards from the Faculty of Science and the School of Computing.

Sometimes, he interviews applicants for undergraduate admissions to Harvard. In his early years, he had wanted to be a carpenter, an adult, a nuclear physicist, and an electrical engineer.