National hurdler Ang Chen Xiang, who is studying medicine at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, decided to take a gap year in between his fourth and final year to allow himself to build a stable base to carry him further in the sport.

Dr Adrian Kuah, Director of Futures Office at NUS’ Office of the President, and Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS, wrote that when British moral philosopher Mary Midgley asked how “useless” academic research and scholarship should be, she is making a crucial point that knowledge creation is an inherently messy business, one in which what started out being denigrated as useless could turn out to be useful and transformative. He opined that we need a balanced higher education system in which we have our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds.

Visiting Prof Chen Kang from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS delivered a public lecture on China’s economic reform on 3 November 2018.

Assoc Prof Sing Tien Foo, Dean’s Chair Associate Professor and Director of the Institute of Real Estate and Urban Studies at NUS opined that the Lease Buyback scheme will likely see more signing up as Singapore ages over the next decade and the headache might be finding buyers for these flats.

Assoc Prof Thang Leng Leng from the Dept of Japanese Studies at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences; and Deputy Director of the Centre for Family Population and Research at NUS discussed how the government is promoting lifelong learning in Singapore and how this will benefit older adults and seniors.

A research team led by Assoc Prof Hai Minh Duong and Prof Nhan Phan-Thien from the Dept of Mechanical Engineering at NUS Faculty of Engineering has come up with a way to turn plastic bottle waste into a new sponge-like material, called PET aerogels. The aerogels have many useful applications, including oil spill cleaning, carbon dioxide absorption, as well as fire safety applications.

An NUS research team led by Prof Carlos Ibanez from the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine has found a way to trigger the death receptor in melanoma skin cancer cells.

Researchers from Duke-NUS Medical School and the Singapore General Hospital have come up with a safer and faster method to grow new human skin by combining a human protein, called laminin, with human skin cells in the laboratory.

Chervin Lam, PhD candidate from the Dept of Communications and New Media at NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, observed that we know too little about the state of doctor-patient communication in Singapore, and opined that as a nation, we need to collectively work towards better health communication, and we can start by understanding its importance.

Assoc Prof Robert Beckman, from the NUS Faculty of Law and Head of the Ocean Law and Policy Programme at the NUS Centre for International Law, shared his views on the importance of joint maritime exercises between Asean member states and major maritime states like China, the US, Japan, Australia and India.