Making First Strikes

In challenging themselves to give of their best, NUS stakeholders have set new records as pioneers and front runners, in both the local and international arenas.

• Associate Professor Ganesan Adaikan (Faculty of Medicine) was officially conferred at the 11th World Congress of the International Society for Sexual Medicine as its 8th and first Asian President.
  
  
• An inter-disciplinary team of NUS researchers from the Faculty of Engineering attained a world first in the fight against malaria with the development of an automated system of counting infected red blood cells that is more accurate and efficient.
  
  
• Lee Keng Leong (School of Business) made his mark as the winner of the first undergraduate student paper competition organised by the Council of Logistics Management (CLM), Philadelphia, US.
  
  
• NUS was the only non-American university to be honoured at the 2004 Society of American Registered Architects (SARA) Student Design Awards when its architectural students received awards for Special Recognition.
  
  
• NUS participated for the first time at the prestigious Saint-Etienne International Design Biennial 2004 with the display of designs by three students from the School of Design & Environment.
  
  
• NUS was chosen by Stanford University and the University of California to be the venue for the inaugural Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education.
  
  
• NUS researchers headed by Principal Investigator, Associate Professor Mary Ng Mah-Lee (Faculty of Medicine), are the first in the world to identify the receptor protein which facilitates entry of the West Nile Virus, causing infections in human. Their findings have significant implications for antiviral drugs.
  
  
• NUS undergraduates proved their mettle when they became the first Singaporeans to win the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition by taking the top two prizes at the competition’s 2004 event.
  
  
• Associate Professor John R Potter led a team of research engineers at the Tropical Marine Science Institute to win the Defence Technology Prize Team Award (R & D) for their development of the world’s first broadband digital ambient noise imaging camera.
  
  
• Teo Yen Kai, a second-year mechanical engineering student and member of the NUS Centennial Everest Expedition Team, made history as the first Singaporean to reach the peak of Mount Everest.
  
  
• The Tera-Scale Campus Grid (TCG@NUS) is the first tera-scale, virtual computing platform with more than two teraflops per second in the region. It is expected to extend the boundaries of NUS researchers in a wide range of cutting-edge research by enabling them to simulate synthetic environments, run complex models and perform sophisticated calculations.