Raymond Chan graduated with First Class Honours from the Department of Mathematics at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 1980. He stayed on as a full-time instructor after graduation, then began his graduate study in 1981 with a full fellowship from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, where he obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics in 1984 and 1985 respectively, under the supervision of Professor Olof Widlund.

Prof. Chan began his career as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1985. He returned to Hong Kong in 1986, first at The University of Hong Kong (1986–92, tenured) and then at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (1993), before joining his alma mater CUHK in 1993. There he served as Associate Director of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (1996–98), Associate Dean of Science (2004–09), Deputy Director of the Hong Kong Bioinformatics Centre (2009–11), and Head of the Mathematics Department (2012–18). He retired from CUHK in 2019 as an Emeritus Professor to become the founding Dean of the College of Science at City University of Hong Kong (CityU). Since 2021 he has served as Vice-President (Student Affairs) at CityU and co-Director of the Hong Kong Centre for Cerebro-Cardiovascular Health Engineering.

Prof. Chan has published 150 journal papers and authored three books. His 2019 book Financial Mathematics, Derivatives and Structured Products was accessed (paid downloads) 76,000 times on SpringerLink, making it the highest-accessed mathematical textbook published by Springer in 2019. He appeared in the ISI Science Citation list of Top Highly-Cited Mathematicians in the world (2001 List) and is ranked in the top 100 in the field of Numerical and Computational Mathematics in the Stanford study of the world’s top 2% scientists, every year since the ranking began in 2020.