See-Kiong was awarded the prestigious Singapore National Computer Board's Overseas Scholarship in 1986 to pursue his undergraduate studies in the United States. He went on to obtain his Bachelor, Masters, and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA, 1989, 1994 & 1998) and another Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence from University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA, 1991).

Prior to returning to Singapore in 2000, See-Kiong worked in multiple countries in Asia, Europe, and North America. He did his post-doc in Japan's Keio University studying the effects of in silico cellular simulation. He then moved on to England to work for the pharmaceutical company Smithkline Beecham as a senior investigator in Bioinformatics. After England, See-Kiong moved back to the US and participated in a Silicon Valley biotech startup DNA Sciences, the first high-throughput genomics technology company to apply Internet crowdsourcing to reach out to the public for their direct involvement in the then-imminent genomic revolution.

As an early data scientist, See-Kiong began venturing into other disciplines in search of big data since his PhD days. Armed with limited knowledge of biology, he bravely crossed over into the then-emerging field of genomics biology and wrote the TrueAllele software when he was a graduate student at CMU. The innovative data processing program enabled large-scale computational genotyping and was used by multiple companies in different countries, from Iceland's then-startup deCode Genetics to UK's pharmaceutical giant Smithkline Beecham, which he had joined subsequently as their senior investigator in bioinformatics.

See-Kiong has since been crossing over into many other disciplines as a seasoned data scientist. From using data mining and machine learning to unravel the biology of the human body (bioinformatics), to using big data and artificial intelligence to understand the "biology" of large-scale urban systems for complex human cities (smart cities), he has shown that there are great values in data that can be harvested with data science, translational research, and a spirit of adventure. [More on my research statement here.]