It has been another very good year for NUS. We continued to keep a strong focus on nurturing and recruiting high quality faculty and staff, on substantially enhancing NUS' education and on connecting even better with our alumni, partners and the wider community. In these and other areas, we have made excellent progress while scoring a number of 'firsts'.
We successfully completed the final preparations for the initial phase of NUS' University Town, which with its distinctive Residential College learning programmes, will be the first of its kind in Singapore and the region. Amidst the many curricular enhancements made last year, the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering partnered the NUS Business School to launch Asia's first ever PhD-MBA Programme. Our signature global education thrust had a notable extension in its offerings when NUS became the first Asian university to partner University of Cambridge in a Student Exchange Programme. Another educational "first" is the partnership between NUS and Yale to establish the Yale-NUS College, which aims to develop a
ground-breaking liberal arts programme that will combine the unique strengths of both universities and blend the ideas and perspectives from the East and the West.
Building on the excellent progress NUS has been making in research, NUS has also inked a landmark agreement to be the first foreign university to set up a research institute in Suzhou Industrial Park. This exciting collaboration will not only strengthen and expand our research in NUS, it will also deepen our expertise and connections in China.
The progress we have made has been recognised internationally, for example in the most recent university rankings, which placed NUS at 27th position among all the universities in the world and in the top 3 in Asia. This reflects the high quality of the NUS community and the strong collective impact of our efforts. I am very grateful to the faculty, staff, students and alumni of NUS whose creativity, talent and hard work have brought NUS to where it is today. While there are many challenges ahead, the NUS community is well-poised to pursue strategies and seize new opportunities to take NUS to greater heights, for the benefit of our students, Singapore and society.
