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Management Board

Since its founding, CSI Singapore’s strategic direction is strongly guided by the Management Board. With extensive academic, business and leadership experience, Board members oversee the institute’s affairs, steering its long-term strategic direction and conducting reviews on the effectiveness of existing policies. They also manage the institute’s risk, accountability and overall financial programs.

The Management Board of CSI Singapore provides strategic direction to the organization, manages risk and accountability and reviews governance arrangements in steering the Institute towards its vision. There are 7 members as follows:

Chairman

Professor Chong Yap Seng

Lien Ying Chow Professor in Medicine Dean, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS

Professor Yap-Seng Chong is a Senior Consultant in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at the National University Hospital (NUH), and a member of the Executive Group of the National University Health System (NUHS) as well as a board member of the National Medical Research Council. As a respected clinician and researcher with a profound interest in women’s health and early development, he is the Lead Principal Investigator of the National Research Foundation Translational and Clinical Research Flagship Program on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. He has also been the Executive Director of the Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) since 2015. Presently, Professor Yap-Seng Chong has been the Dean of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, since 1 January 2019.

Yap-Seng has well over 300 peer-reviewed research publications covering topics like the genetic epidemiology of pregnancy-related disorders, intrapartum and postpartum management, natural childbirth, strategies to promote breastfeeding, and the developmental origins of health and disease. He has formed multiple academic and industry collaborations with a particular focus in the area of early human development and nutrition, with research grant funding of more than $100 million.

Members

Professor Barry Halliwell

Senior Advisor (Academic Appointments & Research Excellence), Office of the Provost, NUS
Distinguished Professor, Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS

Professor Barry Halliwell is a Senior Advisor in Academic Appointments and Research Excellence at the Office of the Provost, NUS. A graduate of the University of Oxford (BA, D.Phil) and holder of a D.Sc from the University of London, he has held significant academic and leadership positions, including at King’s College London, University of California Davis, and the National University of Singapore (NUS).

At NUS, he served in various key roles such as Head of Biochemistry, Founding Executive Director of the NUS Graduate School, and Deputy President (Research and Technology). He is an internationally renowned biochemist, best known for his pioneering research on free radicals, antioxidants, and their role in human diseases, particularly neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s.

Professor Halliwell is among the world's most highly cited researchers in Biology and Biochemistry, with a Hirsch Index of 169. His influential book Free Radicals in Biology and Medicine is a foundational text in the field.

He has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Singapore President’s Science and Technology Medal, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Free Radical Biology and Medicine (USA), and the Ken Bowman Research Award (Canada). In 2021, he was named a Clarivate Citation Laureate.

His work influences global research, policy, and innovation, and he remains active on editorial boards, advisory panels, and as a keynote speaker at international events.

Professor David Virshup

Professor of Pediatrics & Member of the Duke Cancer Institute, Duke University, School of Medicine
Emeritus Professor, Duke-NUS

Dr. Virshup received his B.A. magna cum laude from Beloit College, majoring in chemistry. He received his M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, followed by clinical residency in Pediatrics and a fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology. He credits his research training and mentoring to William Zinkham, Vann Bennett, and Tom Kelly in the departments of Pediatrics, Cell Biology and Anatomy, and Molecular Biology and Genetics, all at Hopkins. Dr. Virshup established his first independent laboratory at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where over the course of 17 years he rose to Professor of Pediatrics and Oncological Sciences with an endowed chair as an investigator at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. He moved to Duke-NUS in Singapore in 2007 to help establish CSCB.

He has been elected to several honorific societies including the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association of American Physicians (AAP). He is board certified in both Pediatrics and Pediatric Hematology/Oncology in the USA.

His research has focused on signal transduction, with an emphasis on both Wnt signaling and circadian rhythms. Early work examined the roles of Protein Phosphatase 2A and Casein Kinase 1 play in these processes. In Singapore, studies of phosphorylation of the PERIOD protein lead to the elucidation of the phosphoswitch model controlling circadian clock speed. In addition, his laboratory collaborated to develop a small molecule inhibitor of Wnt secretion, ETC-159, a drug now in human clinical trials.

Professor Thorsten Wohland

Director, Office of Deputy President (Research & Technology), NUS

Thorsten Wohland studied Physics at the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He conducted his diploma thesis at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and obtained his PhD in Biophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, for theoretical and experimental work on fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). Following a two-year postdoc at Stanford in the USA working on single molecule detection, he joined the National University of Singapore, where he is now Professor in the departments of Biological Sciences and Chemistry developing single molecule fluorescence techniques to address question in cell and developmental biology.

https://discovery.nus.edu.sg/859-thorsten-wohland

Professor Yeoh Khay Guan

Senior Vice President (Health Affairs) Kishore Mahbubani Professor in Medicine and Health Policy, NUS

Professor Yeoh Khay Guan is Senior Vice President (Health Affairs) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His concurrent appointments include the Kishore Mahbubani Professor in Medicine and Health Policy and Chief Executive of the National University Health System (NUHS).

Prof Yeoh practises as a Senior Consultant at the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, National University Hospital (NUH). He has served as Dean of NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine from 2011 to 2018.

As Chief Executive of NUHS, he leads an integrated academic health system including public primary care clinics, community, general, and tertiary hospitals, national specialty centers in cancer, cardiovascular, and oral health, and NUS' medical, nursing, dental, and public health schools under one unified governance.

His research interest is in enhancing the early detection of gastric and colorectal cancers. He is the Lead Principal Investigator of the Singapore Gastric Cancer Consortium, a national flagship research group, and chairs the National Colorectal Cancer Screening Committee of the Health Promotion Board, Ministry of Health. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in international journals, 9 book chapters and has an H-index of 59 with over 11,300 citations. He also serves as a reviewer for several journals and grant funding agencies.

Prof Yeoh received his MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) from NUS in 1987. He trained in internal medicine and gastroenterology at NUH. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London and Glasgow, and a member of the American Gastroenterology Association and American Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. He has received several awards, including the Nishi-Takahashi Lectureship at the 9th International Gastric Cancer Conference in 2011, the National Medical Excellence Award as Outstanding Clinician Scientist from the Ministry of Health in 2013, and the Public Administration Medal (Gold) in 2022 for his contributions to medical education and healthcare.

Dr Karl Ziegelbauer

Chief Scientific Officer, Almirall

Karl Ziegelbauer has a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Tübingen (Germany). Before joining Almirall, he served as Senior Vice President and Head of Open Innovation & Digital Technologies at Bayer Pharmaceuticals. Karl has three decades of experience in drug discovery in international markets such as Germany, Japan, and the United States. He has developed most of his career at the German multinational pharmaceutical company and has assumed positions of increasing responsibility, holding Senior Vice President roles in various medical research fields. Karl has also co-authored more than 50 scientific publications covering basic research as well as drug discovery topics.

Professor Ashok Venkitaraman (ex-officio)

Director, Cancer Science Institute of Singapore
Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS
Executive Director, National Initiative for RNA Biology & its Applications (NIRBA)
Chief Scientist, Biomedical Research Council, Agency for Science, Technology and Research

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