Faculty’s Commitment

The Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine was first established as the Straits and Federated Malay States Government Medical School in 1905. In 1912, it was renamed King Edward VII Medical School, in recognition of a gift of $120,000 from the King Edward VII Memorial Fund. Substantial academic expansion took place and the name was further changed to King Edward VII College of Medicine in 1921 to reflect its status as an academic institution of university status. In 1949, the college amalgamated with Raffles College to form the University of Malaya. This later became the University of Singapore and in 1981 became the National University of Singapore.

In 2005, when NUS celebrated its centennial anniversary, the Yong Loo Lin Trust made a transformational gift of $100 million dollars to the Medical School, which was similarly matched by the Government. The gift will provide funding to recruit and retain top faculty as well as to develop new infrastructure and state-of-the-art facilities to position the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine as the key driver in Singapore ’s Biomedical Science initiative.

To reinforce its position as a Health Science academic campus, Singapore ’s first Bachelor of Science (Nursing) Programme was launched by the School in August 2006 through the establishment of the Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies. The founding of the Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies was made possible through a $10 million donation from the Lee Foundation. The School established two additional centres to complement its active research programmes, the Centre for Health Services Research in collaboration with RAND-Health; and the Centre for Biomedical Ethics through a donation of $2.5 million dollars from the Chen Su Lan Trust. These two centres further cement the School’s status as a Research Centre of Excellence.

These initiatives will help ensure that the School’s mission will continue to succeed for generations to come: to provide excellence in medical education for successive generations of healthcare practitioners, generate world-class research aimed at changing the way medicine is practised, and to provide healthcare of the highest quality to serve the people of Singapore and the region.