PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Wang-Chiew Tan

Wang-Chiew Tan is a computer scientist whose work spans data provenance, data integration and language-model question answering. She earned a first-class computer science degree at the National University of Singapore and a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, then joined UC Santa Cruz in 2002, researched at IBM Almaden from 2010 to 2012, and led research at Megagon Labs on search by experience. Her career includes an ACM Fellowship in 2015 and the 2019 VLDB Women in Database Research Award; at Meta, she held AI research scientist and manager roles from 2021 to 2025 and coauthored 2023 work on querying unstructured and structured data with LLMs. She is a principal engineer at Google; in 2026 she coauthored RPTune, a framework for LLM catalog search.

Now at
Google
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Timeline

  1. 2002

    A Penn PhD and provenance thesis

    She earns a first-class B.Sc. in computer science from the National University of Singapore and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. Her 2002 dissertation is titled Data Annotations, Provenance, and Archiving.

  2. 2002

    Professor at UC Santa Cruz

    She joins UC Santa Cruz's computer science faculty as a professor in 2002.

  3. 2010–2012

    Researcher at IBM Almaden

    From 2010 to 2012, she takes leave from UC Santa Cruz to work as a researcher at IBM Research - Almaden.

  4. 2015

    An ACM Fellowship

    She becomes an ACM Fellow in 2015 for contributions to data provenance and the foundations of information integration.

  5. July 2016–February 2021

    Research at Megagon Labs

    At Megagon Labs, she leads research to improve search by experience through data integration, information extraction, text mining and summarization. Her roles there span July 2016 to February 2021.

  6. 2019

    A VLDB research award

    She receives the VLDB Women in Database Research Award in 2019.

  7. February 2021–April 2025

    Meta AI and LLM query research

    From February 2021 to April 2025, she holds AI Research Scientist and manager roles at Meta. In December 2023, she is an AI Research Scientist at Meta Reality Labs Research. In 2023, she coauthors an opinion paper on using LLMs to query unstructured and structured data.

  8. Since October 2025

    Principal engineer at Google

    In October 2025, she becomes a Principal Engineer at Google. In 2026, she coauthors RPTune, a framework that combines learned catalog curation and LLM post-training for catalog search.

Career

  1. Since 2025GooglePrincipal Engineer
  2. 2021–2025MetaAI Research Scientist and manager, AI Research Scientist
  3. 2016–2021Megagon Labs
  4. 2010–2012IBMResearcher
  5. From 2002University of California, Santa CruzProfessor

Education

  1. 2002University of PennsylvaniaPh.D. in computer science
  2. National University of SingaporeB.Sc. in computer science

From the biography.

  1. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Wang-Chiew Tan. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Wang-Chiew Tan yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Wang-Chiew Tan en.wikipedia.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Wang-Chiew TAN | Singapore Conference on AI scai.gov.sg. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Wang-Chiew Tan - Principal Engineer at Google | The Org theorg.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Unstructured and structured data: Can we have the best of both worlds with large language models? arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. RPTune: Learned Context Curation for LLM Catalog Search arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.