Tan F. Wong was born in Hong Kong. He received the B.Sc. degree (1st Class Honors) from the Department of Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in July 1991 and the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in Dec. 1992 and Dec. 1997, respectively. At Purdue, he worked under the supervision of Prof. James S. Lehnert.

From July 1993 to Jun. 1995, Tan was a research engineer working on the high speed wireless networks project in the Department of Electronics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. From Aug. 1995 to Oct. 1997, he was a research and teaching assistant in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. From Nov. 1997 to July 1998, he worked as a post-doctoral research associate at Purdue University. Since Aug. 1998, Tan has been with the University of Florida, where he is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His main research interests are in the areas of wireless communication and networks, software-defined radio systems, and physical-layer security.

Tan is a senior member of the IEEE. He has served as Editor for Wideband and Multiple Access Wireless Systems for the IEEE Transactions on Communications,  as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, and as the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.