Dr Tan has active interests in breast, urologic and renal pathology, and was a Volume Editor of the 2012 WHO Classification of Tumours of the Breast. She sits on the Editorial Boards of Modern Pathology, Breast Cancer Research, Journal of Clinical Pathology, Pathology, Seminars in Diagnostic Pathology, and Analytical and Quantitative Cytology and Histology. She is Associate Editor of Histopathology and the Singapore Medical Journal. Apart from a busy service largely focused on subspecialty surgical signouts, she and her collaborators are recipients of several research grants related to translational studies of breast and prostate cancer. She is author of more than 400 publications, and participates regularly in regional and international meetings.

Dr Tan’s research interests in breast pathology centre around the classification of fibroepithelial breast lesions and their molecular pathogenesis, triple negative breast cancers, and ductal carcinoma in situ. In urologic pathology, she is engaged in prostate and renal cancer studies and is a contributor to the 2016 WHO Classification of Tumours of the Urinary System and Male Genital Organs.

She is the immediate Past-President of the International Society of Breast Pathology, and was Councillor for Asia of the International Society of Urological Pathology (2009 – 2015).