Dr Tan Ming Jen attended Anglo-Chinese School and Anglo-Chinese Junior College, Singapore and received both his B.Sc.(Eng.) and Ph.D. from The Royal School of Mines, Imperial College, London; the latter degree on a Alcoa/CASE scholarship. He was Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellow at Kyoto University in 1991, Science & Technology Agency (STA) Fellow at the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory (A.I.S.T., M.I.T.I.), Tsukuba, Japan 1992-93, Visiting Scientist at Columbia University (2003) and Fulbright Scholar (2004) at both UCLA and Northwestern University in the U.S.

Dr Tan has more than 250 publications in various international journals and also has more than 100 publications in international conference proceedings and book chapters. His research has over 15,000 citations (Source: Google Scholar, 2023). To date, he has attracted over S$95 million research and development funds from various government funding agencies, industries and international sources as Principal Investigator. He has been consulted regularly by local industries for solving material problems and providing solutions. He is listed as a Global Shaker for his pioneering work on Concrete 3D Printing: https://globalshakers.com/world-shakers/tan-ming-jen/

He was up to recently, the Program Director (Building & Construction) at the Singapore Centre of 3D Printing (SC3DP), and currently the Director of the HP-NTU Digital Manufacturing Corporate Lab. Since 2019, he has been on the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Future Council on Advanced Manufacturing and Value Chains. He is on the Editorial Board of Journal of Magnesium & Alloys (Publisher: Elsevier), and Metals (Publisher: MDPI)