Xiaoyang Tan is currently a faculty member of Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Previously(2006.9-2007.10), he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the LEAR (Learning and Recognition in Vision) team at INRIA Rhone-Alpes in Grenoble, France, with Bill Triggs ,on the EU funded project of  Cognitive-Level Annotation using Latent Statistical Structure, or CLASS for short.

He received his B.S. and M.S. degree in computer applications from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) in 1993 and 1996, respectively. Then he worked at NUAA in June 1996 as an assistant lecturer. He received a Ph.D. degree for his thesis "Towards robust face recognition from a single training sample per person using Self-Organizing Map" from Department of Computer Science and Technology of Nanjing University, China, in 2005.