Professor CHAN ENG SOON joined NUS as a Senior Tutor in 1981 immediately after his Bachelor’s Degree. He was subsequently awarded a NUS Overseas Scholarship to pursue doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He returned to the Department of Civil Engineering, NUS, with a Doctor of Science in Hydrodynamics in 1985 and has since been teaching in the Department. In 1995, he was appointed Head of the Physical Oceanography Research Laboratory, a laboratory set up to pursue research on coastal and offshore processes pertaining to tropical marine waters. Since then, he has also been appointed as the Director of the Tropical Marine Science Institute, Head of Civil Engineering Department and Executive Director of Centre for Offshore Research and Engineering.

Professor Chan’s research interests and activities are focussed on marine processes, including marine hydrodynamics, wave-structure interactions, sediment transport and coastal protection. In more recent years, Professor Chan has also focussed on the study of tidal hydrodynamics and circulation in tropical waters, with a special emphasis on Singapore waters. Following his experimental work on breaking waves, he pursues active research in the theoretical modelling of bubble entrainment, bubble acoustics, and turbulence intensities associated with surface wave breaking. These concepts are incorporated into three-dimensional hydrodynamic models for the enhanced prediction of tidal mixing and transport. Such circulation models are used to describe the transport of contaminants