Impacting International Peers

NUS discoveries and inventions enjoy worldwide visibility when they are highlighted in publications or at international conferences regarded by their peers as standards for discipline-specific excellence. NUS researchers have in the past few years been making their mark, steadily but surely, on both platforms. The following are some of their work which have caught the attention and imagination of the international academe in the review period:

• discovery by Professor Philip Moore and Associate Professor Madhav Bhatia (Faculty of Medicine) that switching off the production of hydrogen sulphide gas during digestion can reverse severe damage caused by acute pancreatitis was published in the online Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (January 2005).
  
  
• a boosting of the speed performance of nanoscale transistors by the Silicon Nano Devices Laboratory was recognised by the 2004 International Electron Devices Meeting as a major development in the technology of next-generation semiconductors.
  
  
• in-situ observations and direct imaging of a 2D nucleation process of charged colloidal particles by Associate Professor Liu Xiang Yang (Faculty of Science) was published in Nature (June 2004)
  
  
• a paper authored by Associate Professor Chen Yu Zong (Faculty of Science) titled Therapeutic Targets: Progress of Their Exploration and Investigation of their Characteristics was accepted for publication by Pharmacological Reviews.
  
  
• an outstanding number of 16 papers from the Department of Physics covering research by the Quantum Information Group, the Nonlinear Dynamics Group and the Centre for Ion Beam Applications was published in the Physical Review Letters during the review year.
  
  
• research by Associate Professor Chen Song Xi (Faculty of Science) on methodologies for mapping quantitative trait loci and disease genes was accepted for publication in three journals – Biometrics, Biometrical Journal and Statistica Sinica.
  
  
• report by the bioinformatics group (School of Computing) on their design of a novel structure to facilitate efficient processing of sequence alignment that outperforms the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) in efficiency and effectiveness was awarded the Best Paper at the 10th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA’05).
  
  
• a new organisation scheme developed by Associate Professor Zeng Hua Chun (Faculty of Engineering) to self generate curved architecture from building blocks formed in situ that relies primarily on geometric constraints and is chemically-driven was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (July 2004).