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Dr. Fann received his B.S. from Tamkang University in Taiwan and his Ph.D. in Physical and Computational Chemistry in 1992 from Temple University. He did postdoctoral research in metalloprotein structures at Northwestern University’s Chemistry Department following his NIH neuropharmacology training fellowship in molecular modeling and structure of G-Protein Coupled Receptors at the Institute of Biomedical Computing (currently Center for Computational Biology) of Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. He joined NIEHS in 1997 as a senior scientific consultant working on biological free radicals and served as the task manager leading a team of specialists with various scientific specialties to support the intramural research laboratories and programs. While at NIEHS he was involved in several bioinformatics and environmental related genomics initiatives. In 2002, Dr. Fann joined NINDS as the Director of the Intramural IT and Bioinformatics Program overseeing the information technology support services and infrastructures as well as developing biomedical informatics research programs. He currently leads the development of an integrated information management system, Clinical Informatics and Management System (CIMS), for clinical and bioinformatics research as well as an intramural bioinformatics facility. The system, which includes the Protocol Tracking and Management System (PTMS), has been adopted by the NIH Institutional Review Board (IRB) to electronically manage the protocol submission, review and approval process and significantly improves the efficiency of clinical research management. Currently, PTMS is used by many institutions in US other than foreign countries, such as Taiwan, South Africa, and Vietnam.

In 2010, his creation of Purchasing On-line Tracking System (POTS) to streamline and transform scientific procurement administration was quickly adopted by the NIH community, and won him the first ever HHS Innovates Award presented by the Secretary of HHS. In addition to his roles and responsibilities at NINDS, Dr. Fann serves on many NIH advisory committees, such as the Medical Executive Committee IT subcommittee, and the Biomedical Translational Research Information System (BTRIS) Steering Committee. He is currently a principle investigator on the Informatics Core of Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine (CNRM) working on building the informatics infrastructure for the National Traumatic Brian Injury (TBI) Study, a collaborative project of the DoD and NIH. In addition, his bioinformatics group has been developing several database tools, such as Stem Cell Database (http://stemcelldb.nih.gov/) and EvoPrinter (http://evoprinter.ninds.nih.gov/), to catalyze the neuroscience research.

His current research interests are computational biology, bioinformatics, clinical research informatics and applying information technology for advancing translational biomedical research.