He is interested in the development and application of time-resolved and time-integrated optical spectroscopic techniques to interrogate the fundamental and applied properties of materials – i.e. probing the energy and charge transfer mechanisms in semiconducting nano-heterostructures & light-harvesting systems; as well as investigating the nonlinear optical properties of nanoscale systems.

Tze Chien received a total of 11 teaching awards from both the National University of Singapore (while he was a teaching assistant at the Department of Physics then) and the Nanyang Technological University, including the Nanyang Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006 and the SPMS Teaching Excellence Award – Honour Roll 2010. He also set up the 1st Year Physics Teaching Laboratory, the 3rd Year Physics Teaching Laboratory and the NTU H3 Physics Teaching Labs for the MOE H3 program.

Tze Chien received several research awards: 2013 SPMS Young Researcher Award, the Institute of Physics Singapore 2014 World Scientific Medal and Prize for Outstanding Physics Research, the 2014 Nanyang Award for Research Excellence (Team) and the 2015 Chemical Society of Japan Asian International Symposium Distinguished Lectureship Award, the 2018 NRF Investigatorship, the 2022 Optica Fellow (Formerly OSA), as well as the Clarivate Analytics/Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher since 2018. In 2023, he is also conferred the Public Administration Medal (Bronze) for his merits and services from the Prime Minister’s Office in Singapore.