Left to right: Prof Lee Soo Ying and Prof Sum Tze Chien (Source: NTU, The Straits Times)
Professor Lee Soo Ying, has been conferred the lifelong honorary appointment of Professor Emeritus, and will be retiring as Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS).
Prof Lee was the Founding Dean (later re-designated as Chair) of the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. He helped to shape the trajectory of the School since its establishment in 2005, and also served as the inaugural Dean of the College of Science.
As head of the Division of Chemistry and Biological Chemistry in SPMS, Prof Lee spearheaded the rise of chemistry at NTU. Currently ranked 9th in the world by QS, it is a remarkable feat given that Chemistry at NTU was established only in 2005.
Prof Lee’s research in chemistry has also earned him numerous honours: for research into ultrafast nonlinear spectroscopy, he won the 2003 Singapore National Science Award; for his contributions to quantum chemistry, he was elected a Fellow of the Singapore National Academy of Science.
In his capacity as IAS Director, Prof Lee initiated programmes such as the Presidential Post-doctoral Speakers’ Series and Research Symposia, the Graduate Colloquia, and interdisciplinary workshops to facilitate interaction across disciplines. Prof Lee is slated to retire at the end of September.
Professor Sum Tze Chien, Associate Chair (Research) at SPMS, will succeed Prof Lee as the new Director of IAS from 1 October 2020. Prof Sum will also be taking on a concurrent appointment as Associate Dean (Research) in the College of Science from 1 January 2021.
As a world-renowned authority on photophysics, Prof Sum is very widely published. His work has appeared in over 250 journals, and he has accumulated a citation count of over 18000, as well as a H-index of 62. In 2019, he was named a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher; he has also won the 2018 National Research Foundation Investigatorship Award and 2014 Institute of Physics Singapore World Scientific Medal and Prize for Outstanding Physics Research.
We would like to extend our warmest congratulations to Prof Lee and Prof Sum for their respective appointments.