Lin Tan is a Chinese computer scientist and software engineering researcher whose intererests include software reliability, the application of text analytics to comments in computer code, and AI-assisted software development. She works at Purdue University as Mary J. Elmore New Frontiers Professor of Computer Science and as a Purdue University Faculty Scholar.1
Education and career
Tan has a 2003 bachelor's degree from Zhejiang University. She completed her Ph.D. in 2009 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with the dissertation Leveraging code comments to improve software reliability supervised by Yuanyuan Zhou.2
She held a Canada Research Chair as an associate professor at the University of Waterloo before moving the Purdue University in 2019.1 She was given the Mary J. Elmore New Frontiers chair as an associate professor in 2020,3 promoted to full professor in 2022,4 and named as a University Faculty Scholar in 2025.1
Recognition
In 2021 the Siebler School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign gave Tan their Early Career Academic Achievement Alumni Award.3 She was named to the 2026 class of IEEE Fellows, "for contributions to software text analytics, software-AI synergy, and software reliability".5
References
References
- Tan selected as a Purdue University Faculty Scholar, Purdue University Department of Computer Science, April 16, 2025, retrieved 2026-01-30
- Tan, Lin (2009), Leveraging code comments to improve software reliability (Ph.D. thesis), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, ProQuest 3395513
- Lin Tan: 2021 Early Career Academic Achievement Alumni Award, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Siebler School of Computing and Data Science, retrieved 2026-01-30
- "Faculty promotions at Purdue approved by board", Purdue Today, Purdue University, April 8, 2022, retrieved 2026-01-30
- IEEE Fellow Class of 2026, IEEE, retrieved 2026-01-30