Prof. Ngan received his B.Sc. (Hons) and Ph.D. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering from Loughborough University, U.K., in 1978 and 1982, respectively. He joined the Department of Electronic Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong as Chair Professor in 2003. He has been appointed Chair Professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology, Chengdu, China, under the National Thousand Talents Program (千人计划) since 2012. Previously he was a Full Professor at the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and the School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of Western Australia, Australia. He was appointed as Honorary Professor of Tunku Abdul Rahman University in Malaysia, Adjunct/Visiting Professor of Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Huaqiao University in China, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of the National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, and Adjunct Professor of the University of Western Australia and RMIT University in Australia. He served as the External Examiner for the B.Eng. degree program of Malaysia's Multimedia University, and was appointed as IEEE Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 2006-2007.

Prof. Ngan is active in many professional activities. He was an associate editor of the Journal on Visual Communications and Image Representation, U.S.A., and an area editor of EURASIP Journal of Image Communications, and served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology and Journal of Applied Signal Processing. He chaired a number of prestigious international conferences on video signal processing and communications and served on the advisory and technical committees of numerous professional organizations. He co-chaired the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in 2010 in Hong Kong. He has published extensively including 3 authored books, 6 edited volumes and over 300 refereed technical papers in the areas of visual signal processing, image/video coding and multimedia communications, which are his main research interests. He also holds 11 patents on image coding/transmission techniques.