Laiwan Chan received her degrees of B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the Engineering Department of 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 late Professor Frank Fallside. She is a co-founder of IDEAL (The International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning), and was the Program Chair and Co-Chair of IDEAL'98 and IDEAL2000 respectively. She was also the Organizing co-chair of the International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP'96), September 24-27, 1996, the Chairperson of the IEEE Hong Kong Section Computer Chapter in 1994. She is a governing board member of the Asian-Pacific Neural Network Assembly, was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, a member of the Editorial Board of the Neural Computing Surveys, and an external examiner to the Open University of Hong Kong. She was the Program Coordinator for the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitors Program for Asia/Pacific. She has been program committee member and organizing committee member of a number of conferences and reviewer of several journals. She was the Head of the Division of Computer Science and Engineering from 1998 to 2002 and is currently the Associate Dean (Education) in the Faculty of Engineering.

Her research interest is in data mining, financial engineering and bioinformatics and the modelling of artificial neural networks, in particular, the applications of neural networks and ICA in time series prediction, financial engineering, portfolio management, risk analysis, gene expression data analysis, image recognition, Cantonese speech recognition, constraint satisfaction problems and image database. She also works with the Department of Orthopeadics and Traumatology, Faculty of Medicine in the Chinese University of Hong Kong to develop the Smartward system.