Cavan Loy received his PhD in Computer Science from the Queen Mary University of London in 2010. Prior to joining NTU, he served as a research assistant professor at the MMLab of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, from 2013 to 2018. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary University of London and Vision Semantics Limited (acquired by Veritone), from 2010 to 2013.

His research interests include computer vision and deep learning with a focus on image/video restoration and enhancement, generative tasks, and representation learning. He and his research group pioneer the research in face detection, face alignment, and image super-resolution by deep learning. His journal paper on image super-resolution was selected as the Most Popular Article by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence in 2016. It remains as one of the top 10 non-survey articles to date. The work is also awarded the Test of Time Award by Technical Committee on Computer Vision of China Computer Federation (CCF-CV).

Loy was recognised as one of the 100 most influential scholars in computer vision from 2020 to 2024 by AMiner. His accolades include the, CCF-CV Test of Time Award, Nanyang Research Award, and the Singapore Open Research Award.