Er-Win Tan is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of International and Strategic Studies, University of Malaya. He completed his PhD in International Politics at Aberystwyth University, on the U.S.-North Korean Security Dilemma. He is also the author of The U.S. Versus the North Korean Nuclear Threat: Mitigating the Nuclear Security Dilemma.

He was a POSCO Visiting Research Fellow at the East-West Center in 2016, where he undertook work on the asymmetrical structure of the U.S.-North Korean security dilemma and is the process of converting these research findings into his second book, examining the period of U.S.-North Korean interaction from 1993 to 2016.