Prof Chan is a Director of Maz Energy Pte Ltd and Xin Xiang (Guangzhou) Hydrogen Technologies Co., Ltd. He is a consultant to Total SA and has been a member of several advisory boards, including those for the NTU President and Provost, the Management Board of the Energy Studies Institute, Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies, and the China-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City Think Tank.

Funded by the UK's Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment, Dr. Chan's PhD research focused on heavy-duty internal combustion engines. However, since 1997, he has extended his interests to hydrogen and fuel cells. He was the Organizer and Conference Chair of the 1st World Hydrogen Technologies Convention in Singapore in 2005 and Conference Chair of HYPOTHESIS XIII in 2018. From 2006 to 2008, he held a joint appointment with AStar as Director of the SERC Fuel Cell Program, leading a team of over 100 people from four AStar institutes and collaborating with Rolls-Royce Fuel Cell Systems. Additionally, from 2011 to 2016, he was a Principal Investigator at the Singapore-Peking University Research Centre for A Sustainable Low Carbon Future, funded by the National Research Foundation.

His research has earned several accolades, including the George Stephenson Medal from the UK IMechE in 2000, the Scientific Achievement Award from the International Association of Hydrogen Energy, USA, in 2007, the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” award from Thomson Reuters in 2014, the Nanyang Award (Research Excellence) in 2014, the Nanyang Award (Innovation and Entrepreneurship) in 2017, and the “Star of Innovation Talent” from the Guangzhou Government in 2018. He is an editorial board member of Fuel Cells, Journal of Power Technologies, Energy Conversion and Management, and International Journal of Energy Research. Prof. Chan has published 267 refereed journal papers with more than 13,000 citations and an h-index of 58. He has been teaching Thermodynamics since 1991 and was awarded "Teacher-of-the-Year" in 2000.