Sandiway Fong received his B.Sc. in Computing Science, at Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London. He received an S.M. in 1986 at MIT, where he worked in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

After working at IBM's Watson Research Center, he returned to MIT for his Ph.D.

In 1991, he joined the NEC Research Institute to work on natural language processing, and machine translation. In 2003, he moved to the University of Arizona, where his research interests are at the intersection of computer science and formal linguistics, with a focus on multilingual parsing, ontolinguistics, computational lexical semantics and computational morphology.