Professor Chin received his B.A.Sc. degree from the University of Toronto in 1972, and his M.S., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in 1974, 1975, and 1976, respectively. Prior to joining The University of Hong Kong (HKU) in 1985, he had taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the University of California, San Diego; the University of Alberta; the Chinese University of Hong Kong; and the University of Texas at Dallas.

Professor Chin was the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at HKU and was the founding Head of the Department from its establishment until December 31, 1999. From 2002 until July 31, 2006, he had served as the Associate Dean of the Graduate School. Since 2007, Prof Chin has been serving as an Associate Dean of the Faculty of Engineering.

Professor Chin has served as conference chairman and a member of the program committee of numerous international workshops and conferences. He is currently serving as Managing Editor of the International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science and is a member of the editorial boards of Current Bioinformatics, Information Processing Letters, the Computer Processing of Oriental Languages and the Chinese Journal of Advanced Software Research.

Professor Chin has served on many government policy and advisory committees and in 1998 acted as the Project Leader of a study commissioned by the Select Committee appointed by the Legislative Council to inquire into the circumstances leading to the problems surrounding the commencement of the operation of the new Hong Kong International Airport at Chek Lap Kok (CLK). During 2001, he was seconded to serve as the (interim) CEO of the Hong Kong Domain Name Registration Company Limited.

Professor Chin's research interests include design and analysis of algorithms, on-line algorithms, and bioinformatics including Motif-finding (Motif discovery) and De Novo genome assembly (IDBA). In 2002 at the age of 54, he discovered the challenge of marathon running and has finished one marathon and five half-marathons.