In this series, NUS News profiles the University’s Presidential Young Professors who are at the forefront of their research fields, turning creative ideas into important innovations that make the world better.

“I was at the barber getting a haircut,” Assistant Professor Yuan Chao said as he looked back on the time in 2019 when he got the news from his department that he had been awarded with the Presidential Young Professorship.  

Asst Prof Yuan, who is from the Department of Architecture under the NUS College of Design and Environment, began his journey at NUS in 2016. His research looks at urban planning and design to build cities that are sustainable and resilient to the effects of climate change. Together with his research team, they use numerical simulation and field measurements to study the impact of building design and urban planning on the microclimate.

His team also develops user-friendly urban planning tools, such as a Geographic Information System (GIS) tool to estimate the impact of urban planning on anthropogenic heat dispersion – heat released as a result of human activities.

One of Asst Prof Yuan’s most recent projects focuses on the coupling effects of climate change and urbanisation. In that project, his team demonstrated the importance of building design on the microclimate in the Tanjong Pagar area. Drawing comparison between two neighbouring communities with different building forms, they found that different building forms create very different microclimates, particularly the surrounding air temperature and wind flow.

Building resilience now, for a sustainable future

Asst Prof Yuan’s research looks at climate-sensitive urban planning and design of sustainable and resilient cities.

The concept of sustainable cities incorporates practise and implementation of urban planning and design of living environments to help mitigate urban heat, and at the same time reduce the carbon footprint of the city, which is essential in reversing the effects of climate change for future generations.

“When I was a student, we talked about sustainability to ensure that there are enough resources for the next generation. But now, we work on climate resilience, which is for the current generation, which highlights the urgency to tackle current climate issues,” said Asst Prof Yuan, emphasising the importance of building climate resilient cities against the damaging effects of climate change.

He shared that urban planning and design plays an important part in building climate-resilient cities, and requires all-encompassing strategies at multi-temporal and spatial scales. “Long-term climate issues such as rising global temperatures caused by climate change could increase the intensity of short-term climate issues such as urban heat island effect caused by urbanisation,” said Asst Prof Yuan.

He hopes that through his research, he can debunk the misconception that the same solutions can be applied to both climate change and climate issues caused by urbanisation, when in fact they should be tackled as two entities that require different solutions.

“Many people focus on combatting climate change, but they often neglect the impact of urbanisation. As buildings are getting taller and cities become denser, we need to rethink our living environment and look at the joint effect of urbanisation and climate change,” said Asst Prof Yuan.

“Another misconception is that we need to decrease urban density to achieve a better living environment. But through better building design and planning, we can actually increase the density and still achieve better living environments that are sustainable and resilient against the effects of climate change,” he added.

Aside from scientific work, like climate sensing and modelling, Asst Prof Yuan’s role as an architect looks at the implementation of these scientific outputs into models that can provide useful information for urban planners and building designers to understand how the microclimate, such as air pollutant dispersion and air temperature, are affected by urban planning and design, especially in high-density urban areas like Singapore.

Asst Prof Yuan’s research aligns with NUS’ key research area of Sustainability and Urban Solutions and the domain in Singapore’s Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 master plan that focuses on Urban Solutions and Sustainability.

Motivation to keep going

With various indoor plants lining his office window at SDE1, Asst Prof Yuan remembers his time as a PhD student in Hong Kong. He recalled a “Eureka!” moment he experienced while contemplating his research question.

“I was on the way home, waiting on the platform at my university’s train station when an idea suddenly came to mind out of nowhere to develop a solution for my research question,” said Asst Prof Yuan. This idea eventually became the main part of Asst Prof Yuan’s PhD thesis which focused on the impact of urban surfaces on outdoor natural ventilation. While others may consider this luck, but this moment of epiphany was the result of long hours of hard work and preparation that Asst Prof Yuan had put in.

Asst Prof Yuan’s inspiration also stemmed from his PhD supervisor Professor Edward Ng, who is currently teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prof Ng had instilled in him a sense of responsibility when conducting research: doing research is not solely for publishing papers or citations; research outcomes should improve people’s lives. This philosophy motivated Asst Prof Yuan to continue in this path of research to help build climate-sensitive urban cities.

When asked to cite a special learning moment with his supervisor, Asst Prof Yuan recalled a late evening discussion where Prof Ng questioned him about the evidence behind his suggested planning guideline.

“He said that if we suggest land use density to be 4.3, others may ask why not 4.4, since one decimal point decrease in land use density translates into very high costs. It is about the balance between new development and environmental quality. That is why we need to provide scientific evidence to support implementation decisions. It felt like I was not just working with him; I was also fighting climate change together with him,” Asst Prof Yuan reminisced.

Inspiring the next generation

Now, with his own group of PhD students and research fellows in tow, Asst Prof Yuan hopes to inspire them to persevere in their academic research in this field, and ultimately, to develop sufficient expertise to contribute towards building climate-resilient and sustainable urban cities.

“I hope they believe that immediate actions on climate change are needed, and urban planning and design are crucial for mitigating climate issues and improving people’s lives. It’s only when the students think it’s important and necessary, will they invest their energy and time in this topic, just like how my supervisor had inspired me,” said Asst Prof Yuan.

This passionate educator also firmly believes that one should not allow his background to define his future. Asst Prof Yuan received his undergraduate degree from an ordinary university, but through perseverance, he carved out a remarkable academic career in NUS and other prestigious institutions. He hopes that his story will inspire his students to keep going despite the difficulties and rigour of academic life.

More Proof of Passion stories here.

The NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme supports talented young academics with excellent research track records in advancing their cutting-edge research. More information about the PYP scheme is available here.

In this series, NUS News profiles the University’s Presidential Young Professors who are at the forefront of their research fields, turning creative ideas into important innovations that make the world better.

“Everything has to be in place and everything has to go right - there’s a predefined score. But occasionally one plays wrong notes. If the mistakes are big enough, the whole piece breaks down.”

For Presidential Young Professor Xue Shifeng, this concept applies whether she is playing her double bass in the band, or in her lab at NUS Biological Sciences investigating how genetic mutations affect the development of an embryo, like a symphony being performed by Nature itself.

A life of music and science

The 2018 Young Scientist Award winner initially wanted to be a sound engineer. Her mother was a consumer electronics product engineer and would often bring work home to do - not stacks of paperwork, but partially assembled electronic devices that she was troubleshooting, like radios. The young Xue knew what a radio looked like on the inside and how it worked, and even listened to music on some of those test sets. She also learnt to play the electronic organ and double bass.

But when she went to junior college, she got hooked on something else - the genes of living organisms. She was amazed how genetic sequences made up of only four base pairs could encode the entire complexity of life on earth. “I was really interested in how you could manipulate genes, copy genes and cut genes using tools in the lab,” said Asst Prof Xue.

She went on to study at the University of California at San Diego, where her fervour for the topic was further stoked at an undergraduate embryology lab class watching frog and fish grow from eggs.

At that point, she wanted to walk into a lab right away and do a research project on embryonic development. Alas, she could not find a suitable lab that had a vacancy for an undergraduate. It didn’t deter her, however. She laid plans. She searched for a lab where she could do a PhD on the topic she wanted, and it eventually brought her to the University of California in San Francisco.

Of course, success did not come easy. Ms Xue was studying ribosomes, the tiny round molecular complexes in the cell that translate RNA sequences into the proteins essential for cellular activities. She wanted to prove that a tiny part of the messenger RNA sequence, only about 300 base pairs long, served as a tag that helped the correct type of ribosome identify the sequence from which to make protein.

“We made a laboratory model that was completely normal except that it did not have this little non-coding part of a gene. It was a very long experiment.”

She lived in suspense for more than a year, ironing out the technical kinks in the experiment.

Finally, the time came to check. If her theory was correct, the model would still have the RNA floating around in the cells, but it would not be translated into protein anymore because the tag was missing.

Using molecular methods, she searched for the protein in the cells, and found nothing. That was the eureka moment. Overcome with euphoria, she called her advisor’s mobile but the latter was driving and did not pick up. The advisor eventually arrived in the lab and said, “I knew you had something, because you never call me!”

Applied research with a blue-skies spirit

Asst Prof Xue is now a principal investigator charting her own research frontiers and mentoring her own PhD students. One of their latest projects is to better understand how mutations in a gene called SMCHD1 cause a range of serious genetic diseases including being born without a nose, a rare condition called ​​Bosma arhinia microphthalmia syndrome. They have to figure out the right and wrong notes of the “music” without having a printed score, and which “instruments” are playing them, by modifying the genes, growing the cells and observing what happens.

It is a long time before anyone can implant stem cells onto the patient’s face to grow a nose, but Asst Prof Xue’s research has already proven useful for treating a type of muscular dystrophy, which is caused by the same gene. Furthermore, the different cell types from the nose that grow on her lab’s Petri dishes are helping the researchers better understand how the face is formed during development. As craniofacial disorders are among the most common birth defects, this could eventually lead to prevention or treatments for such defects.

Asst Prof Xue’s research not only contributes to the NUS key research area of Biomedical Science and Translational Medicine, but also exemplifies the synergy of applied and basic or blue-skies research that Prof Xue feels is the way forward.

Imparting knowledge to others

Asst Prof Xue’s mission is not only to do research but also to spread knowledge far and wide. During her PhD, she took time off to teach genetics to young children at the local tech museum and made the rounds at high schools in the area as well. More recently, an undergraduate who did a project at her lab was so inspired by the experience that the student Photoshopped the faces of her and the lab team onto Power Rangers characters.

But Asst Prof Xue’s young daughter is getting it easy for the time being. At night, mum puts daughter into bed before continuing with work. The child is too young to visit the lab or understand RNA transcription - but nevertheless on her way to discovering the symphony of life.

More Proof of Passion stories here.

The NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme supports talented young academics with excellent research track records in advancing their cutting-edge research. More information about the PYP scheme is available here.

In this series, NUS News profiles the University’s Presidential Young Professors who are at the forefront of their research fields, turning creative ideas into important innovations that make the world better.

When he was growing up in a village in Shantou, China, he would go to the wet market with his mother, where she tasked him with working out their payments for fresh fish and produce and the change due. From this seemingly mundane routine of everyday life, he developed a strong drive for math and science.

“Although my mom was a Chinese-language teacher, she saw the importance of early education in math and took every opportunity to guide me,” said Presidential Young Professor Lin Zhewang, who went on to get a string of academic scholarships as well as awards, and started his own lab at NUS Biological Sciences in September 2021. He now studies vital molecular mechanisms that control the quantity and quality of protein synthesis in living cells, and how these mechanisms protect the cells from disease.

He already has a solid track record. In 2020, he was the lead author in a Science paper that documented a crucial protein that controls the amount of tubulin in a cell. Tubulin is a structural molecule that forms the cell’s internal “skeleton”. There are different varieties of tubulin and they have to be present in the correct proportions and configuration for many important functions from molecular transport to cell division.

Assistant Professor Lin began specialising in this topic during his postdoctoral stint at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. For 40 years, scientists had tried to understand the mechanisms of cellular quality control, but with little success as they did not have the right molecular tools. But by the time he entered the field, new molecular markers had been developed that could detect and bind to specific chemical structures when activated by ultraviolet light, enabling him to “see” the molecular machinery of the cell more clearly.

Journey of ups and downs

Asst Prof Lin’s research specialty started taking shape when, as an undergraduate, he got a letter from Cornell University in the US, inviting him to do a PhD in chemical biology there. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore his favourite subject.    

When he got to Cornell, his new advisor showed him how the lab was able to use basic chemical principles to deduce the unknown biological properties of molecules from their chemical structure alone.

“I was amazed by the power of chemistry in solving important biological questions,” said Asst Prof Lin. “I saw the opportunity of harnessing chemical knowledge to do biology because after all, biology at the molecular level is chemistry.”

As he embarked on his research career, Asst Prof Lin would wield this powerful approach to accurately identify biological molecules and make groundbreaking discoveries of what those molecules do in living cells.

But the journey was not easy. He had to deal with endless failed experiments, a rite of passage for a PhD student. On top of that, he got married halfway through it, which his lab-mates at Cornell helped organise. Alas, the newlyweds had no honeymoon as he simply ran out of time. But once a year, one of them made the transatlantic flight to visit the other.

When Asst Prof Lin felt his PhD was going badly, he took time off to cook. He figured out a way to roast Peking duck in an oven while keeping its skin crispy. The duck is usually roasted over a wood fire. Instead, he stuck a beer bottle in the bird’s bottom so it stood upright above the oven tray, preventing the collected juices from wetting the skin. After that, he felt confident again to tackle the experimental challenges in the lab. His efforts ultimately paid off, and he won a departmental prize for his academic achievements.

When he moved on to his postdoc, he also took on a “night-time job” - taking care of his baby son. It was stressful, but he “trained” the toddler to sleep through the night without waking up by adjusting the milk feeding timings. As a result, he could have a good night’s rest and wake up all refreshed for research.

“I planned all the experiments very carefully and did things very efficiently although I had limited time in the lab,” he said - to such an extent that his colleagues said his project was going at the “speed of light”.

Giving back to society

Over the past two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has infected Asst Prof Lin’s lab with a quest to find a universal method for protecting people against all SARS-type (severe acute respiratory syndrome) viruses, such as those that caused the SARS outbreak in 2003, MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) in 2012 and now COVID-19. Existing measures like vaccines and antiviral drugs usually target specific variants of a virus; the virus can bypass these defences simply by mutating into another variant.

The lab is now trying to find a universal molecular vector in the human cell that the virus uses to hijack the cell. If this vector can be disabled by some drug, it will stop the virus in its tracks no matter how it mutates. Asst Prof Lin’s lab is particularly suited to this work because it has developed the appropriate molecular tools as part of its overall research theme.

Asst Prof Lin’s research is relevant to not only infectious diseases but also other serious illnesses such as cancer. This is because the cellular quality control mechanisms that he is studying are responsible for every aspect of a cell’s function. His work has wide potential applicability to NUS’ key focus area of Biomedical Science and Translational Medicine, as well as the Human Health and Potential domain of Singapore’s Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 master plan.

Asst Prof Lin now has two kids, and finds himself having to give regular research updates to his elder son who asks him every day, “Dad, have you conquered the virus yet?” It is a challenge for him to explain to a four-year-old how the grown-ups are trying to understand the “machinery” that manufactures the proteins that form a “container” for the virus, but that could well put the boy on track to becoming another Presidential Young Professor.

More Proof of Passion stories here.

The NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme supports talented young academics with excellent research track records in advancing their cutting-edge research. More information about the PYP scheme is available here.

In this series, NUS News profiles the University’s Presidential Young Professors who are at the forefront of their research fields, turning creative ideas into important innovations that make the world better.

As an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies, Presidential Young Professor Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine studies how human language conveys complex meanings, with an emphasis on the grammars of understudied languages of Southeast Asia. His most recent papers investigate aspects of Burmese, Pangasinan (Philippines), Rejang (Indonesia), and Vietnamese.

He first discovered what would soon be his career while in high school; he pointed out to his French teacher that Mandarin, French and English all seem to have surprising similarities that connect them. His French teacher then encouraged him to look into linguistics.

“When we study the grammars of very different languages of the world, we notice many recurring patterns and principles in how they express complex thoughts. This is an important discovery.” Asst Prof Erlewine said. “At the same time, to a certain extent this is not surprising, because ultimately, these are all humans that are doing these things. You don’t teach children these grammatical rules, but they still can pick it up.”

But where languages diverge from one another can also be fruitful to study. Better understanding the precise ways in which languages vary can lead us to refine our theories of the human capacity for language.

Studying endangered languages

After completing college in 2007, Asst Prof Erlewine spent a year in Taiwan as part of the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Programme. Fresh out of the University of Chicago, he would assist with teaching English in local elementary schools in a rural aboriginal village near Hualien for the year. The town’s people were predominantly Atayal, the third-largest indigenous group in Taiwan. Though the country has over 80,000 Atayal people, far fewer can speak the language fluently, with younger generations choosing to speak Mandarin or Hokkien instead.

For fun, Asst Prof Erlewine decided to learn Atayal from an elder who did not mind entertaining an enthusiastic foreigner. So, for the year, he learnt Atayal from simple children’s textbooks that he would buy in Taipei. His teacher had previously worked with foreign linguists, which explained why he was not averse to spending his time teaching a new college graduate the language.

Asst Prof Erlewine recalls that he one day thought about what motivated his teacher to cooperate with these academics. “He said: ‘In a generation or two, maybe no one will speak this language. But if by others studying it and describing it, we have something that can be passed down, then that is something that I could feel pride in’.

“That stuck with me and certainly made me interested in going down this route of doing work on understudied languages,” Asst Prof Erlewine said.

Learning from native speakers

Research often requires intensive fieldwork where linguists directly interact with native speakers, trying to tease out the nuanced rules that govern their language. Finding communities of such speakers is often challenging and, Asst Prof Erlewine believes, luck-based. “There is no magical formula for finding speakers. A lot of the time, research is directed by what languages you find yourself having access to,” he said.

Asst Prof Erlewine remembers how he started a three-year research project on Toba Batak – a minority language spoken in northern Sumatra - after meeting a Batak colleague at NUS. “She took me to her Batak church that meets in Singapore and I went a few times. There were maybe less than 50 congregants,” said Asst Prof Erlewine.

From that serendipitous meeting, he would go on to regularly meet with a couple of them over the next few years. “You start from scratch, just trying to learn things about this language, and it is really these individual relationships that we end up having to build,” Asst Prof Erlewine explained.

Fieldwork has also taken him out of the country to remote locations. It once took him to Dharamsala, a city surrounded by cedar forests near the edge of the Himalayas and the home of the largest Tibetan community outside of Tibet. Asst Prof Erlewine spent two summers in Dharamsala learning and studying Tibetan. “It was very stimulating to hear something that felt very remote early on, and something that felt very rare, all around you – spoken by people just living their life,” he said. He would sit in local cafés and be surrounded by the sounds of a language that is spoken by less than 0.1 per cent of the world. The memory serves as a constant reminder of how vast the field of under-studied languages really is.

Building a community of scholars in a young field

Many languages of Southeast Asia continue to be understudied in theoretical linguistics, including national languages such as Burmese and Thai, as well as languages spoken by minorities within those countries. Researching such languages is a behemoth task that Asst Prof Erlewine understands he cannot do alone.

“I put a lot of energy into, not just my own research directly, but in trying to build a community of scholars doing this kind of work,” he said. Since he joined NUS in 2015, Asst Prof Erlewine has worked alongside and supervised young linguists who go on to pursue PhDs, publish in international journals or present at international conferences. “It is very exciting and fulfilling to be able to raise young students and young scholars who go on to do really good work on these languages of Southeast Asia,” he said.

Impact of climate change on languages

The task of researching these languages will only increase in the next century. “Thinking about the study of language in the next 50 years, the story is going to be about climate change, and the changes to people's living situations as a result of environmental changes,” he said.

He believes that climate change will displace huge populations of people who escape from droughts, wars and other disasters. And migration inevitably would mean language contact as diasporic people begin to live alongside one another – bringing with it, language change, especially in Southeast Asia.

When reading one of Asst Prof Erlewine’s papers, one can see the mathematical concepts being invoked to describe language systems with empirical precision. But the researcher himself says that he never forgets what lies at the heart of his work. “The intellectual work that I do can be abstract to some degree, but ultimately, our focus is about people and the human experience,” he explained. 

More Proof of Passion stories here.

The NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme supports talented young academics with excellent research track records in advancing their cutting-edge research. More information about the PYP scheme is available here.

In this series, NUS News profiles the University’s Presidential Young Professors who are at the forefront of their research fields, turning creative ideas into important innovations that make the world better.

She was growing up in Japan when one day, her elder sister told her about the atomic bombs that fell on her country. Her sister said there were thousands of nuclear weapons and if anyone “pushed the button on it”, they would all die.

“That shocked me, and I had a childish wish to bring peace to the world,” said Presidential Young Professor Sayaka Chatani. She is now pursuing that very goal at NUS History as a specialist in East Asia, fulfilling a lifelong quest to figure out why and how people and countries fight with one another.

Following her heart

She had wanted to be a diplomat at first, and had envisioned working at the United Nations. But she became increasingly curious about the mechanism underlying human society and started her doctoral studies in political science. While in the programme, cutting short her project to start afresh on a PhD in history.

The budding historian had realised that what she really wanted to do was to make an impact through the intimate real-life stories of ordinary people. Years before, as a child growing up in a quiet town between Kobe and Osaka, she had eagerly read through her father’s collection of Japanese history novels, while having little interest in her parents’ day-to-day work running a small marketing business. Those books had stimulated a lasting curiosity in seeing things from a more human angle.

She broke the news of her PhD “resignation” to her chief advisor in an email, as he was away on sabbatical. The advisors were supportive but some were “not sure if your career will be ok with a history degree because of, you know, the job market.” But her new PhD advisor told her that “you don’t have to be a historian. History is such a vast field, you can do whatever you want.”

The history of ordinary people

From her new base at Columbia University in New York, she travelled to Taiwan, Korea and Japan, accompanied by her boyfriend, a political science graduate student she had met in the US and now her husband. She spent two years learning Chinese in Taiwan. She wanted to meet locals who, many years before, had signed up as soldiers to fight for the Japanese empire.

At first she contacted university academics to try to track down the veterans, but found no leads. Then she went looking in the local library and uncovered a journal written by amateur historians. There was a phone number on the back. She called it, and someone answered.

That phone conversation led to a voyage through remote towns in the interior of Taiwan, where she met many of the people who were trained to fight on the front lines during the war. They were already in their 80s and 90s.

She discovered that military training had given the rural youth a sense of achievement, leadership and social victory against the “intellectuals” in the capital cities, although these youths were not necessarily driven by a desire to serve the empire. This and many other precious insights have been preserved for posterity in her book titled Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies, which was published by Cornell University Press in 2018.

Assistant Professor Chatani has also fostered close friendships with the Korean community in Japan, who  throughout the postwar period engaged in much cultural and economic exchange between Japan and North Korea. Educated Japanese women, many of whom were married to educated Korean men, went to live in Korean slums in Japanese cities to help Korean residents achieve their decolonisation from the imperial past. The Japanese women even took part in traditional Korean ceremonies and sent their children to Korean schools in Japan.

Asst Prof Chatani said of her work, “I hope it will promote mutual understanding and lessen hostility between the two countries, and show how we can establish peaceful ties with one another.” It also fits into one of NUS’ key research foci, Asian Studies, which aims to develop expertise in critical social, political and economic issues in the region.

Spreading the message of history far and wide

Asst Prof Chatani is working on an online collection of primary sources of historical information on all aspects of the Japanese empire. Some entries have even been contributed by undergraduate students who took her Honours-level history seminar at NUS. She is active on social media, trying to raise awareness of historical facts and debunk misinformation about Japan’s imperial wrongdoings. “I think this is a new frontier for historians - to be out there speaking directly to the public,” she said.

She is also passing on her love of history to the younger ones, so humanity’s legacy may continue to be preserved for the inspiration of future generations. Her eight-year-old son already knows more than she does about the two world wars, while her four-year-old daughter recently learned that “mama studies things that happened a long, long time ago!”

More Proof of Passion stories here.

The NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme supports talented young academics with excellent research track records in advancing their cutting-edge research. More information about the PYP scheme is available here.

In this series, NUS News profiles the University’s Presidential Young Professors who are at the forefront of their research fields, turning creative ideas into important innovations that make the world better.

Maps have been one of the most important ways that humans have understood the physical world. They have mediated global trade routes, decided the victors of wars and helped the construction of towering metropolises. Today, in the digital age, we can log onto our computers and point a cursor at the furthest reaches of the globe, and see a map and street view of its cities and towns.

It is not surprising that many of us assume that the world is basically known to us, and there are no more gaps in our maps to fill. However, Presidential Young Professor Filip Biljecki from the Department of Architecture under the NUS College of Design and Engineering, and the Department of Real Estate under the NUS Business School, explains that is not the case. Sometimes, the most unknown places are right outside our doors. How tall are the buildings that we see outside our windows? How many of them have rooftop gardens or solar panels? How many of those buildings receive direct sunlight or a nice cooling breeze? 

Far from being trivial questions, these missing datasets hold invaluable insights for the coming age of urban planning. In the Singaporean context, Assistant Professor Biljecki points out that it is vital to know how the shape and size of buildings impact variables like energy consumption, urban vibrancy, and the microclimate. If too many buildings are in direct sunlight and do not get airflow, it is likely that more energy will be spent on cooling – leaving a bigger carbon footprint. “One of the things that we noticed talking to people who use this kind of data, but who are not currently in the field like we are, is that they take data for granted, especially the quality,” he said.

Filling the knowledge gap in modern maps

Asst Prof Biljecki, who specialises in geospatial data science, joined NUS in 2017. Here, he established the NUS Urban Analytics Lab, a research group dedicated to geospatial and 3D urban modelling, and their work aligns well with the University’s key research priorities of developing integrative sustainability solutions as well as capabilities to accelerate Singapore’s transformation into a smart nation.

Much of his work looks at plugging the knowledge gaps in our modern maps. Some of these gaps exist because data gathering is expensive. Before the advent of artificial intelligence, data gathering was done by surveyors manually, which led to huge data inequalities between different stakeholders and countries. Other problems, like the varying levels of information transparency around the world, also impact global data access. Countries that are the most impoverished are unable to use data to guide many developmental policy decisions.

To overcome this, Asst Prof Biljecki and the researchers he works with are taking advantage of modern computing techniques as much as possible. “Artificial intelligence has really brought a revolution to my field,” he said, “It has finally enabled the automatic extraction of data for a fraction of the cost of previous approaches.”

In the past, the teams that Asst Prof Biljecki has worked in have used computer vision and images from satellites or street views to estimate variables like building heights. By using this unprecedented visibility of urban spaces, researchers can now begin to fill in the blank spaces in our knowledge. In one of his co-authored papers, Asst Prof Biljecki used AI to count the number of rooftops in 17 cities that were covered in solar panels or green spaces: a testament to how far satellite imaging has come. “Geospatial technologies can help us to answer if it is beneficial to put solar panels on, let's say, 20% of rooftops in a city. Thanks to simulations, we can estimate whether that makes economic sense and whether it makes environmental sense,” he said.

Other applications of his work are so wide-ranging that it is challenging to unify them into distinct categories. In 2021, Asst Prof Biljecki’s team published a method for characterising cooling systems in buildings just by using infrared images of the air-conditioning units mounted on the building’s exterior. Equipped with that information, people can now get a clearer picture of the energy consumption behaviour of a building’s residents. In the same year, Asst Prof Biljecki also helped to develop a comprehensive index of how ‘bike-able’ different cities are with the aid of street view imagery. Future city planners may one day use it to build more bicycle-friendly infrastructure and encourage greener transport.

Open sharing of data, interdisciplinary collaboration the way forward

Geospatial data is multimodal and multidisciplinary, and Asst Prof Biljecki prides himself on embracing the colourful nature of his research.

Datasets about urban environments unsurprisingly intersect many different disciplines. After all, a city is a nexus point where important issues meet: energy, transport, livability, smart technology, and more. Asst Prof Biljecki said he has become more multidisciplinary with each project. “Even when walking out into the city, one inevitable thing I notice is how intertwined everything is,” he commented.

In the past, he has worked with researchers with specialties from computing to transportation, and is a strong believer that this trend will only strengthen over time.

Strengthening the open sharing and use of data and resources is something that Asst Prof Biljecki feels strongly about. Much of the work he does is open-source: available for anyone to use and adapt. Increasing access to data also allows for more analyses to be conducted by NGOs, academics and corporations, many of whom are interested in the same questions.

For countries with low amounts of data, crowdsourcing is often a viable option, Asst Prof Biljecki shared, “There are crowdsourced efforts that are voluntary. People use their time and effort to map cities – one example is OpenStreetMap, the world's largest repository of crowdsourced geospatial data.” Such crowdsourced repositories will fuel research in the future. The race to build smarter and better cities is not won by the efforts of a few, but by the efforts of many people who help each other: a democratic, communal effort.

On a foundation of more comprehensive and widely available data, the future possibilities are endless. Asst Prof Biljecki has a few predictions for what he believes the future will hold.

There are the perennial developmental issues such as the growth of smart cities and achieving carbon neutrality that he will continue to be involved in. For those, Asst Prof Biljecki believes that ‘digital twins’ could serve as an invaluable tool for future city-wide simulations. Digital twins are virtual representations of cityscapes. They can be something like a relatively simple 3D map of a city with real-time information or full models that can simulate urban micro-climates, and could help policymakers and researchers better understand how to build back greener and smarter.

More Proof of Passion stories here.

The NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme supports talented young academics with excellent research track records in advancing their cutting-edge research. More information about the PYP scheme is available here.

In this series, NUS News profiles the University’s Presidential Young Professors who are at the forefront of their research fields, turning creative ideas into important innovations that make the world better.

We all like to believe that we make good decisions, and for a long time, most economists believed that we did. In textbook economic models, it was assumed that people were super-intelligent rational actors who made perfectly optimal choices.

However, in 2008, Assistant Professor David Peter Daniels would read a book that would shape his future career. Nudge was written by the 2017 Economics Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein. The book questioned whether people were all that good at making choices, and pointed out how human decisions are often distorted by systematic biases. Moreover, it turns out that the context in which a choice is presented to us has a big impact on the decisions we end up making. This means that policymakers, by tweaking the context surrounding a choice, have a powerful ability to use “nudges” to steer people towards better decisions.

Still a student at Harvard University when he read Nudge, a young David Daniels knew he wanted to research how biases influence human behaviour. His body of work now covers a wide range of the irrational and imperfect things that people do in decisions, negotiations, and organisations. Hearing the cheerful Californian talk about his research is similar to seeing a magician doing a magic trick. He outlines what assumptions people have about certain behaviours – what they anticipate others will do – but like a magician that pulls out a rabbit from a top hat, Asst Prof Daniels, who is Presidential Young Professor at NUS Business, unveils how lots of his research actually contradicts what we would expect.

Making choices in surprising ways

Asst Prof Daniels focuses on three broad research areas related to choices: influence and negotiation (how good are people at influencing other people?), diversity assessments and policies (what do investors think about gender diversity in companies?), and prosocial behaviours (do major disasters cause people to volunteer less?).

As an example of how his research is often surprising, he talks about prosocial behaviour. “We know that small harms often attract help. If Person A trips and falls while Person B doesn’t, we have a stronger impulse to do something nice for Person A,” he said. “And for a long time, it was assumed that if people feel the impulse to help after small harms, they would feel even more of an impulse to help after big harms.”

“But we find the opposite: after major disasters like a huge hurricane, prosocial behaviour actually goes down,” Asst Prof Daniels said.

His work is full of unexpected twists and turns, as well as an attempt to understand why they happen using an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on psychology, economics, and management research.

His research on diversity has equally fascinating results. Often businesses wish to increase workplace diversity since research suggests that diversity is correlated with improved company performance. But how do people actually evaluate diversity and do they evaluate it well?

In fact, our evaluations of diversity are impacted by a lot of unexpected things. If Team A has more racial diversity than Team B, people rate Team A as also having more gender diversity than Team B – even if both teams have identical numbers of men and women! In other words, information about one kind of diversity “spills over” to distort our evaluations of other kinds of diversity.

By exploring how biases influence our thinking, Asst Prof Daniels hopes to understand how we can become better decision makers.

“A common saying in economics is that there is no such thing as a free lunch,” Asst Prof Daniels commented, “But when you bring psychology and behavioural science into the picture, you often do find free lunches. For example, when people are not currently making the best decision possible, there exist solutions which can make some people better off without making anyone worse off.”

This brings Asst Prof Daniels onto his final area of research: influence and negotiation. He has been studying the behaviour of “choice architects” – influencers who present choices to others. Think: a Wall Street broker presenting their client with a list of various stocks they could buy; a real-estate agent bringing a young couple to see different flats; or a mid-level manager who discusses multiple project ideas with his/her team. All these influencers must decide how to present options to others – hopefully in a way that helps nudge the people around them in beneficial directions.

“For a while now, we've known that it really matters whether you describe choices to other people using a positive frame or negative frame. When you describe choices by highlighting what people stand to gain from doing something – when you use a positive frame – then people act very conservatively and cautiously,” Asst Prof Daniels said, “However, if you talk about what people stand to lose from not doing something – when you use a negative frame – then people start flipping coins and taking risks.”

This is exactly the kind of bias that a choice architect or influencer should be using to influence others. If you want to influence others to act risk averse, you should use a positive frame. If you want to influence others to act risk seeking, you should use a negative frame. Sounds easy enough. But in a study of business managers, Asst Prof Daniels found that managers’ actual behaviour didn’t always follow this pattern. When managers wanted others to act risk averse, they did use a positive frame. So far, so good. But when mangers wanted others to act risk seeking, they still used a positive frame. This was suboptimal; in fact, it meant that managers’ influence strategies were actually backfiring on them!

“There’s a free lunch right there,” he points out. Sometimes in organisations, the smart play is for people to take calculated risks. In such cases, leaders need to resist their instinct to use a positive frame when presenting choices to followers. Instead, leaders should use a negative frame. If they did – if they used a better nudge – then everyone would be made better off.

Using big data to learn more about ourselves

Asst Prof Daniels has now been at NUS for about two years after holding a post at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His work contains a blend of both classic experimental approaches and newer methods that use big data and machine learning. “Classic experiments, where you invite people to participate in a research study, are great because they allow control over randomisation and over causality,” he said, “But ‘new school’ approaches allow you to analyse huge datasets involving naturally-occurring phenomena that you just can’t recreate in a lab. This opens the door to answering many exciting research questions, like how prosocial behaviour changes after an earthquake.”

He believes machine learning and big data will become bigger and bigger parts of research as computers continue to improve: “Big data and machine learning are here to stay – they can really help us learn about ourselves through the unprecedented availability of so much information, and the ability to analyse it using cutting-edge machine learning tools.”

More Proof of Passion stories here.

The NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme supports talented young academics with excellent research track records in advancing their cutting-edge research. More information about the PYP scheme is available here.

In this series, NUS News profiles the University’s Presidential Young Professors who are at the forefront of their research fields, turning creative ideas into important innovations that make the world better.

As a primary school girl, her favourite pastime was soldering electronic circuit boards in her father’s workshop at home.

Twenty-five years later, she is designing superconducting “circuit boards” for quantum computers as well as leading and inspiring an international group of young researchers in her own laboratory at the futuristic Centre for Quantum Technologies at NUS.

Assistant Professor Yvonne Gao’s scientific quest is supported not only by the NUS Presidential Young Professorship that she received in 2020, but also by Singapore’s National Research Foundation Fellowship. She has also been named one of Women’s Weekly’s Great Women of Our Time and one of the MIT Tech Review’s Innovators under 35 (Asia Pacific). In 2021, she received the prestigious Young Scientist Award which recognises young researchers, aged 35 years and below, who are actively engaged in R&D in Singapore, and who have shown great potential to be world-class researchers in their fields of expertise.

Asst Prof Gao’s lab is exploring techniques to split quantum computers into modules interconnected by superconducting circuits. This makes the system much more flexible and robust to failures.

So far, most quantum computer prototypes work as a single CPU, which uses principles of quantum mechanics to perform large, memory-intensive calculations many, many times faster than regular computers. While a traditional computing bit is in a state of either 1 or 0, a quantum bit can be both at the same time.

Asst Prof Gao designs the modules using aluminium blocks precision-machined with polygonal patterns cooled to near absolute zero - more than 270 degrees below freezing. The centrepiece of her lab is the fridge. It uses helium-3 and helium-4 isotopes as the coolant and is not meant for ice cream and soda.

However, she quickly dispels any notion that quantum mechanics is a geeky subject studied by weird scientists. “It’s just like what anyone would do in any working environment - we’re solving problems. The problems are of a scientific nature just because of our choice. We need specific background knowledge but the problem-solving skills apply to any profession.”

Her work could eventually improve people’s lives in many different ways, for instance, it could give a boost to data science and artificial intelligence that are vital to Singapore’s Smart Nation drive. In fact, this is one of the key foci of both NUS and Singapore’s Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 plan.

A journey full of fun

Asst Prof Gao first found her “true love” in secondary school. She had three suitors - biology, chemistry and physics. She had a hard time with the first two, having to memorise lots of things from chemical formulas to taxonomic names to metabolic pathways.

But she loved physics lessons. Her teacher explained physics principles using analogies with everyday phenomena. “I didn’t like memorising things. For physics, I felt like once I understood it, I could deduce a lot of things rather than memorising a name that you just have to know,” she said.

Her enthusiasm in her studies earned her two of Singapore’s National Science Scholarships for her undergraduate and PhD studies.

When Ms Gao first arrived at the University of Oxford, she struggled to focus. She was experiencing a freedom she never had before. There were speeches by prime ministers, there were street protests about tuition fees, and many other things going on.

And of course, there were the English pubs. She hung out often with the other physics students at her college, three of whom were girls. She was the only one among them who would continue in physics research, while the rest went on to successful careers in other sectors. “It really shows the value of a physics education - it prepares you for whatever you want to do after,” she said.

By her second year Ms Gao had gotten the hang of it. Her course was highly conceptual, so for her project, she bought some “random” parts on eBay and assembled her own heat detector. She invited her classmates to walk in front of it during the presentation to demonstrate its functionalities.      

It was at Oxford that she first got “entangled” in quantum mechanics, inspired by her college tutor who was a specialist in the field. That would ultimately take her across the Atlantic to Yale University, where she joined the lab of Professor Robert J. Schoelkopf and embarked on her journey of exploration and discovery of superconducting quantum circuits.

“It was a really old building,” Asst Prof Gao said. “When I first started going to the lab, it felt overwhelming because there were so many instruments I had never seen before, there were so many people discussing things and using terms I had never heard of. I got worried about how steep the learning curve would be.”

But she quickly caught up and was soon talking the same jargon as everyone else. In fact, after a very exciting and intense first year in the lab, she decided to recharge by embarking on a six-week trek to Everest Base Camp.

Just before she left for the hike, she was working on a project on how contaminants and defects in a thin film affected the operation of a quantum device. The system was behaving weirdly and no one knew what was going on.

It might seem like the worst time to “abandon” the lab, but the cool and crisp air of the Himalayas cleared Ms Gao’s head, and she returned feeling invincible with a renewed vigour and confidence in solving any scientific problem. After further investigation, the team finally discovered that a previously undetected magnetic field was the culprit, and now it took their research in a new and even more interesting direction.

During her time at Yale, her friends introduced her to the sport of bouldering - another activity that let her do her favourite thing, problem solving. In fact, climbers often refer to finding a route up a rock face as “solving” a “problem”. She also met a French physicist who would become her husband.

Nurturing a team of problem-solvers

Today, Asst Prof Gao makes it clear to her team that it is completely fine to make mistakes. Without mistakes, one may not even realise there is a problem to be solved. “That also makes the whole process a lot more fun because people are not afraid to try new things,” she said. “Even if it fails or does not come to anything, you learn something from it.”

To ensure her lab has the best possible problem-solving capabilities, she picked a cosmopolitan mix of theoreticians and experimentalists from six countries across the globe. She has an electrical engineer, a materials scientist and a traditional physicist in her team. Some came with no idea of superconducting quantum circuits. But collectively, they brought the diverse skills needed to solve unanticipated problems.

When COVID-19 hit, Asst Prof Gao and her team could no longer get together for regular meals and leisure activities the way they used to. But they have found ways around it, like having online dinners to chat about everything scientific and non-scientific, and playing board games online.

Meanwhile, she is managing her time between the lab and a new family life, having had her first child recently. And that gives her the ideal state of mind to nurture her lab like a family - one that talks heart to heart when it comes to tackling their next great scientific challenge, whatever it may be.

More Proof of Passion stories here.

The NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme supports talented young academics with excellent research track records in advancing their cutting-edge research. More information about the PYP scheme is available here.

In this series, NUS News profiles the University’s Presidential Young Professors who are at the forefront of their research fields, turning creative ideas into important innovations that make the world better.

What is easier to teach? A computer or a child? Maybe a computer because it is able to execute commands perfectly. Maybe a child because most of us understand how to speak to another human while we may not understand how to write complex code. Presidential Young Professor Professor You Yang from NUS Computer Science says that it depends on the task.

We are at the stage of technological development where it is easy to teach a computer basic tasks like elementary image recognition. However, computers still struggle to learn concepts that have higher-orders of thinking.

The human brain is a spectacularly complicated organ. What comes naturally to people is difficult to teach a computer. Take the example of language. At six months old, a baby can babble “ma-ma” and repeat the sounds they hear. And at the age two to three, the child begins to use prepositions that indicate the position of an object (“the cat is in the box”), use pronouns (“you”, “me”, “her”) and can respond to simple questions.

These actions require a high level of cognition. Language is made up of grammar, context, tone as well as the definitional meaning of individual words. In fact, the human brain is so advanced that within five years of casual learning and observation, most children can carry a basic conversation. The same goes for a human’s ability to make sense of images they see in the world. So, how do we teach a computer to see the world in the same way a human does?

This is the scope of Asst Prof You’s work: developing and improving upon artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. This area of research is part of NUS’ research thrust of developing capabilities to realise Singapore’s vision of becoming a smart nation, and supports the Smart Nation and Digital Economy domain of Singapore’s Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 Plan.

Fascination with AI

When Asst Prof You was 15, he saw Google and Facebook’s explosive growth as he watched the news, and the young teenager knew computers were going to be the future. He later attended a talk by Andrew Ng, the then-Chief Scientist at Baidu, about the future of AI as he was studying computer science at Tsinghua University. It became evident that AI would dominate technology in the next century with uses in every day applications like Google Translate and YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. AI would also form the foundation for future innovation.

“Tesla needs a supercomputer to train an AI system for their self-driving cars,” Asst Prof You said, “But the future may be even more crazy – we could have individual self-flying machines.”

To achieve these large technological feats, it is important that scientists are able to accurately and efficiently train AI models – a field where Asst Prof You has made headlines. In 2017, his team broke the ImageNet training speed record. He then broke the BERT training speed record two years later. His contributions have cemented him in Forbes’ Asia 30 Under 30 list in 2021 when he also was awarded the Presidential Young Professorship at NUS.

Asst Prof You says that training a neural network is similar to teaching a child to read by giving them books – but instead of books, we give the AI data to learn from. Training takes time, and often speed sacrifices the accuracy of the end result. For example, if we want to train a child to read 1000 books in total, we can either give them 10 books a day for 100 days or 100 books a day for 10 days. However, when a child has too many books to read, we cannot be sure that the child is learning the correct content. Increasing the “batch size”, in other words, often decreases accuracy.

Asst Prof You helps to solve this problem by creating an optimiser that allows computer scientists to train neural networks quickly without sacrificing performance.

Training computers faster and more accurately

So what is an optimiser? Let’s take the example of a neutral network learning how to translate from English to French. Say you wish to translate the sentence, “I like basketball” (which Asst Prof You says he enjoys watching in his spare time). You can just translate each word into its equivalent in French - “I” is “je”, “like” is “aimer” and “basketball” is just “basketball”. However, French speakers know that the phrase, “Je aimer basketball” is grammatically incorrect. The correct French translation is actually, “J’aime le basketball”.

Hard-programming all the small and unique rules in grammar and context would take ages and probably would not yield good results. So, it’s much better if we could somehow teach the French and English language to a computer. In neural networks, scientists feed the AI system a huge data bank of sentences in English and their correct translations in French. These sentences are converted to “vectors” – which is a group of numbers that the computer can understand and work with. The computer then maps the English-language vectors onto the French-language vectors via a mathematical function (i.e. an equation). The function is the computer’s way of translating English to French. A “decoder” will then convert these numbers back into words and sentences.

Of course, these functions are rarely simple and they may work perfectly in some examples but may not for other exceptions. So, we need a way to maximise the accuracy of these functions, which is measured by a “loss function” – the less loss, the better the result. But it is hard for a computer to minimise loss. How does a computer know if the loss it currently has is the smallest possible loss? How does it know that there is no better function that leads to a more accurate translation? This process of the AI model adjusting its functions in order to minimise loss until it has the minimum possible is determined by an optimiser.

Computers need to adjust the things they learn when they come across anomalies, but these adjustments should not be too small or too large. A good optimiser makes sure that a neural network makes appropriately-sized adjustments to the things it learns.

Asst Prof You devised two optimisation techniques: Layer-wise Adaptive Rate Scaling (LARS) and Layer-wise Adapative Moments optimisation for Batch training (LAMB). Both propelled neural network training to be faster by allowing larger batch sizes to be used without degrading performance. The training time for BERT (a natural language model) was reduced from three days to just 76 minutes. Similarly, ImageNet (which is used for image processing) training times were reduced from 14 days to 14 minutes. Scientists from Google, Microsoft and NVIDIA used Asst Prof You’s techniques when they proceeded to further improve training speeds for BERT and ImageNet.

Breaking new ground in distributed computing

Besides smashing records in training times, Asst Prof You’s work encompasses a wide gamut of other AI research. He runs several projects at NUS Computing and one of his favourites is the development of a computer system that allows for code written for one computer to easily be transferred onto a distributed computing system.

Often one computer is not enough to run or train an AI model. Instead, scientists must separate out tasks and datasets across multiple servers, but getting many computers to efficiently communicate with each other is currently very hard. Asst Prof You’s work brings science one step closer to surmounting these challenges in distributed computing.

In August 2021, Asst Prof You founded a startup, HPC-AI Tech, which uses cloud-based technology to speed up central processing units and graphics processing units so both can keep up with ever faster AI models. The company has since attracted $4.7 million in venture capital from former Google China chief Kai-Fu Lee's Sinovation Ventures, Forbes Midas Lister Anna Fang's ZhenFund and Menlo Park-based BlueRun Ventures.

While HPC-AI currently has 10 clients, including Chinese auto maker Geely, Asst Prof You expects a big demand for his technology in the future. He has therefore set a goal of 1,000 clients in three years with a 50 per cent annual increase after that.

Never one to rest on his past laurels, Asst Prof You looks into the future and says, “The future of computing is distributed – and I'm excited to leverage this to maximise the potential of AI and beyond.”

More Proof of Passion stories here. 

The NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme supports talented young academics with excellent research track records in advancing their cutting-edge research. More information about the PYP scheme is available here. 

In this series, NUS News profiles the University’s Presidential Young Professors who are at the forefront of their research fields, turning creative ideas into important innovations that make the world better.

In school, he loved to get into discussions with his classmates about any topic under the sun. But there was one thing he really hated - losing an argument when he could not find a convincing line of reasoning.

So much so that he decided to give up his filmmaking ambitions to study philosophy and mathematics, where he could argue to his heart’s content and express his logic in rigorous equations.

“I felt really uncomfortable when people asked me questions and I didn’t know what to think about it or didn’t have a good reason for what I thought,” said Assistant Professor Abelard Podgorski at NUS Arts and Social Sciences, who was given the faculty’s 2020/21 Award for Promising Researcher and conferred the NUS Presidential Young Professorship in 2021. “It was this itch I had to scratch, and I felt philosophy was the only field that really scratched that itch - trying to convince people that something was right and giving the best argument.”

Making decisions in a complex world

The ability to formulate logical arguments helps a lot when one needs to make a decision with multiple options and uncertainty about the future. This is in fact one of Asst Prof Podgorski’s main research topics - he gives an example of choosing between becoming a professor and becoming a soldier.

It is generally thought that one should choose so as to effectively promote one’s values. For example, a soldier would value country and honour, while a professor would value knowledge. But sometimes, one’s decisions affect one’s values themselves, making it hard to see how to live up to that principle.

The problem is multiplied when there are more than two options, such as choosing among professor, soldier, lawyer and banker. To simplify the problem, Asst Prof Podgorski proposes treating it as a tournament where the participants, or options, compete pair by pair instead of all at the same time. To pick a winner for the tournament, he borrows a principle from social choice theory about how to choose a winner in an election with many candidates.

These insights could benefit not only people’s personal lives but also society at large. It could help policymakers make decisions when those decisions might affect who the relevant stakeholders will be.

Growing up and living with philosophy

Asst Prof Podgorski was born in Poland, but his family moved to the United States soon after. His mother studied computer science there, while his father took up a professorship in mathematics and statistics.

What he did not know was that his father had studied philosophy at university. The two had frequent “philosophical” discussions at home, and the younger Podgorski got acquainted with the famous philosophers from his father’s books.

Since then, Asst Prof Podgorski has ranged far and wide in applying philosophical thought to social issues.

He has ventured into the often controversial realm of animal ethics, arguing that one’s decisions about what food to buy cannot prevent the suffering of animals without also preventing their existence. For this reason, one’s primary obligation is to make sure one buys meat from animals whose lives were overall worth living.

“My view is in the middle between people who think eating meat is totally ok and people who think eating meat is totally wrong,” he said. “It gives the animal activists something to say to meat eaters that they won’t reject totally. People really like eating meat. You can give them the strongest arguments why they should stop completely, but you’re not going to get any uptake that way.”

A meat lover himself, he has in fact taken the cue from his own analysis to eat more vegetables and cage-free eggs.

Another area Asst Prof Podgorski thinks philosophy can help people is in dealing with the sadness and trauma of losing loved ones. In metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that tries to understand existence, someone who has ‘passed on’ is just as alive but simply in another location in the four dimensions of space and time. He likes the philosophy of the Tralfamadorian aliens in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. To them, in author Kurt Vonnegut's words, “all moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.”

Much of philosophical thinking happens in one’s own mind, so Asst Prof Podgorski’s work has not been greatly affected by the isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. But even he is feeling the strain.

“I can work by myself and get research done, but it does get tiring after a while not interacting with people, even for me,” he said. “It’s really helpful to have some stimulation for ideas, like attending conferences. I didn’t appreciate how much that mattered in keeping my gears turning, having new inputs of thoughts and information.”

He sometimes indulges in the other path in life he did not choose - by watching movies. His favourites include 2001: A Space Odyssey, and In the Mood for Love by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. Both feature thought-provoking plots that move very slowly, and cinematic imagery filled with beautiful patterns and colours.

Yet, Asst Prof Podgorski is itching for the next opportunity to attend a conference - and get into a face-to-face argument again.

More Proof of Passion stories here. 

The NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme supports talented young academics with excellent research track records in advancing their cutting-edge research. More information about the PYP scheme is available here.

In this series, NUS News profiles the University’s Presidential Young Professors who are at the forefront of their research fields, turning creative ideas into important innovations that make the world better.

When she was a PhD student, Assistant Professor Shao Huilin returned to her lab after a two-week holiday to find that her biology experiment no longer worked, although she did it exactly the same way as before. It was mystifying and frustrating. She was forced to troubleshoot it step by step.

Finally she found the problem. She had used a micropipette with a slightly different-sized tip. She could not even see the difference with her eyes, but that was enough to cause the experiment to fail. She learnt not to take seemingly unimportant details for granted.

Now an NUS Presidential Young Professor at NUS Biomedical Engineering under the NUS College of Design and Engineering as well as NUS Institute for Health Innovation & Technology, with a joint appointment at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), no detail escapes Asst Prof Shao’s eye as she engineers nanoscale devices to detect early-warning signals of disease - so-called biomarkers - in blood samples.

Carving “jewelry” at the nanoscale

Asst Prof Shao’s nanodevices are often made of precious metals like gold and silver, but not because they look nice and shiny. These metals possess unique properties when they are patterned at the nanoscale.

She designs her “jewelry” using powerful computer simulations to find a particular surface pattern that will interact uniquely with specific disease biomarkers.

Then she uses precise lithography, to “print” the pattern, but the “ink” is a powerful electron beam from a sophisticated machine with steel pressure hatches at high vacuum. It can make fine patterns with nanoscale resolution.

A blood sample is pipetted onto the patterned device and a light shone on it - a smartphone LED will do. If biomarkers of the target disease are present, the device will produce light with a unique spectrum of wavelengths in a phenomenon called surface plasmon resonance. It shows not only that the disease is present but also contains lots of molecular information that can guide treatment decisions.

Asst Prof Shao’s work helps to advance biomedical science and translation medicine, one of the eight key focus areas of NUS’ research strategy. Her team’s successful research outcomes also contributes towards the Human Health and Potential domain of the Singapore Government’s Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) 2025 plan.

The adventures of a budding scientist

As a junior college student, she split her time between a project on genes in living cells and another on signal transmission through fibre optics because she knew nothing about the topic and “it sounded cool”.

Soon after, she earned a National Science Scholarship from A*STAR that covered her studies all the way from undergraduate to PhD.

After receiving a double major in Biological Sciences and in Physics from Cornell University, she undertook dual PhD studies in Biophysics at Harvard University and Medical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The PhD training made engineers do full-time rotations in hospitals, as if they were medical students. She had to see patients and conduct medical examinations.

Asst Prof Shao said, “It gave us the right language to discuss medical problems with clinicians, while having the science and engineering background to find new ways to address them.”

She had a once-in-a-lifetime experience being in an operating theatre for six hours and holding a living heart that was undergoing a bypass. She also experienced first-hand the anxiety of patients and their loved ones while waiting for medical test results, which could take weeks. She realised the difference it would make, both medically and emotionally, if serious diseases could be diagnosed more quickly.

She decided to harness her knowledge of physics and engineering to help doctors make faster and better decisions that could mean the difference between life and death.

A “crime scene” at the molecular level

To Asst Prof Shao, biomarkers of disease are like clues at a crime scene. “The secrets to these diseases are already present in the blood. The trick is how to reveal them,” she said.

This approach enabled her lab to formulate the world’s first blood test that takes just an hour to determine how cancer is responding to treatments. The ExoSCOPE test can be conducted 24 hours after treatment initiation, so doctors could adjust the treatment plan to improve the patient’s chance of recovery.

She has also been using her spycraft on COVID-19. Her lab has engineered a molecular switch – a nanostructure comprising an enzyme coupled to a DNA sequence. This molecular switch is highly sensitive to the presence of COVID messenger RNA (mRNA).

When in contact with COVID-19 mRNA from a swab sample, the molecular switch is turned on to activate a cascade of intense reactions, thereby generating strong optical signals that can be detected using a smartphone camera. The procedure takes less than an hour. It is much faster and easier than the conventional polymerase chain reaction test, and just as accurate.

The researchers’ findings were published in the journal Science Advances in March 2021 and Advanced Science in July 2021.

Besides cancer and COVID-19, Asst Prof Shao’s team has also developed a blood test in 2019 to detect Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages. Recently, Asst Prof Shao has also set-up a spin-off company to commercialise the novel technology platforms developed by her team.

Her outstanding scientific achievements were also recognised through various awards, such as the NUS Young Researcher Award in 2021, the Young Scientist Award conferred by the Singapore National Academy of Science (2019) and the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science National Fellowship (2016).

New opportunities

Asst Prof Shao says the Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) programme encourages research in scientifically riskier but medically important areas, such as neurodegenerative diseases. “PYP brings a strong sense of responsibility to do something meaningful and impactful. It’s a new chapter,” she added.

Her favourite place for hanging out with her lab members and exploring new research opportunities is the NUS Science Canteen, where generations of budding scientists have gone through their rites of passage. And as she enjoys her favourite laksa and chicken rice, which she missed dearly when she was in the US, she is chewing on her next project, trying to figure out, in her own words, “new ways of hacking biology”.

More Proof of Passion stories here.

The NUS Presidential Young Professorship (PYP) scheme supports talented young academics with excellent research track records in advancing their cutting-edge research. More information about the PYP scheme is available here.