Hong Tan
Hong Tan is founder and director of the Haptic Interface Research Laboratory at Purdue University. In 1986, she received a Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering (with a minor in Computer Science) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She earned her Master and Doctorate degrees, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1988 and 1996, respectively. From 1991 to 1993, she was a Research Associate at the Tufts University School of Medicine. From 1996 to 1998, she was a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory. In 1998, she joined the faculty at Purdue's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an Assistant Professor, and in 2003 received tenure and promotion to an Associate Professor. Since 2002, she has held a courtesy appointment at Purdue's School of Mechanical Engineering for her contribution to the Perception-Based Engineering program. Her broad research interests in the area of haptic interfaces include psychophysics, haptic rendering, and distributed contact sensing. She is a recipient of National Science Foundation's Early Faculty Development (CAREER) Award (2000-2004). She has served on numerous conference program committees, and is currently co-organizer (with Blake Hannaford) of International Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems (2003-2005).