Ting-Chung Poon attended the University of Iowa, USA, receiving BA, MSEE, and PhD degrees. He joined Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), USA, in 1983. His research interests include Information Optics and digital holography.

Poon is the author of Optical Scanning Holography with MATLAB (Springer, 2007), and is the co-author of, among other textbooks, Modern Information Optics with MATLAB (Cambridge University Press and Higher Education Press, China, 2023). Poon served as Division Editor of Applied Optics from 2008 to 2014, and was Associate Editor-in-Chief of Chinese Optics Letters. Poon is Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Photonics, and Editor of Applied Sciences.

He is a Fellow of Optica, SPIE, IoP, and IEEE. In 2016, he received SPIE’s Dennis Gabor Award. He is the recipient of the 2024 Emmett N. Leith Medal, “For seminal contributions to digital holography and optical information processing.”