Putting research to work: Prof Lam Khin Yong

 

Translational research goes beyond merely conducting research with practical applications – the research needs to be at a level that can create intellectual property (IP), such as patents, with societal impact and strong market potential.

NTU strives to achieve this through its work with more than 250 industry partners. One reason for the successes that the University has enjoyed lies in how it works with industry, says Prof Lam Khin Yong, NTU’s Vice President (Industry).

“We work hand in hand with industry partners on research from Day One,” explains Prof Lam, who is from NTU’s School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

“This is very useful because companies have deep market knowledge and can provide inputs that help guide scientific research towards outcomes that can be commercialised to benefit society.”

When NTU works with industry, each research project is led from the start by an NTU professor and a company scientist or engineer, he adds. This is especially so for NTU-industry alliances in the form of corporate labs co-funded by government agencies and businesses, and joint research labs funded by companies.

NTU has around 20 corporate and joint labs on campus with many leading businesses such as Continental, Delta Electronics, Mastercard, Rolls-Royce, Singtel and SP Group.

Research tie-ups between academia and industry benefit both parties, emphasises Prof Lam, who is in charge of overseeing and driving NTU’s partnerships with industry.

“Industry partners are able to access world-class expertise to develop processes, products and services that add value to them,” he says. “This also means companies can tap trained student researchers at the undergraduate and graduate levels, whom they can hire after graduation to continue research and development with the firms.”

NTU’s strengths in research are well recognised. According to the US News and World Report global university rankings for 2022 to 2023, NTU ranked first worldwide in five areas of research: condensed matter physics, energy and fuels, materials science, nanoscience and nanotechnology, and physical chemistry.

The same rankings also placed the University second globally in the fields of artificial intelligence, electrical and electronic engineering, and engineering.

One industry player that has benefitted from partnering NTU is British engineering giant Rolls-Royce. The company applied research from the Rolls-Royce@NTU Corporate Lab, housed within NTU, to help design and develop future power and propulsion systems and improve manufacturing operations in Singapore and other Rolls-Royce sites elsewhere.

The lab was the result of a relationship between Singapore and Rolls-Royce that Prof Lam helped to nurture for decades since his days in the late 1990s as the Founding Executive Director of the Institute of High Performance Computing at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research.

Another beneficiary of research unions between NTU and industry is students; they stand to gain valuable research and development training, and mentorship. “Such experiences are important for students to thrive in a world now shaped by technological innovations that are moving at a rapid pace,” says Prof Lam.

Besides corporate and joint labs, NTU is also working collectively as a consortium with multiple parties – more than just a single corporation or government agency – that share a common mission and purpose to address complex challenges and drive innovation.

The approach draws on the strengths of each party in the consortium, from academia to industry. “This allows us to pool resources, knowledge and capabilities to accelerate the development and application of cutting-edge solutions,” says Prof Lam.

This was the case for the world’s first testbed launched in Singapore to develop and test innovative and sustainable cooling technologies for data centres in the tropics.

Dubbed the Sustainable Tropical Data Centre Testbed, it involves researchers led by NTU and the National University of Singapore working with many industry partners, from CBRE and Intel, to Ascenix and Keppel Data Centres.

NTU works with industry on other testbeds too, and its campus is a living lab to test new technologies. According to Prof Lam, these testbeds assess the practical implications of research in controlled but real environments, ensuring the technologies can be applied on a broader level and scaled up.

The University’s Energy Research Institute @ NTU, for instance, is working with its partners on testbeds to shore up Singapore’s clean energy and sustainability capabilities.

Its collaboration with the country’s National Environment Agency aims to test how well different sources of renewable energy can work under the Renewable Energy Integration Demonstrator-Singapore project, which helps power a facility on Singapore’s only landfill.

Beyond Singapore, Prof Lam says that NTU is cultivating long-term tie-ups with overseas companies, universities, research institutes and public agencies for research, education and development initiatives.

Recently, the University established the Indonesia-NTU Singapore Institute of Research for Sustainability and Innovation with Indonesia’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology, as well as four top universities in the country. The institute seeks to address climate change and sustainable development.

For research projects like these and many others with industry, Prof Lam stresses that “the ingredient for success is always teamwork”. Students, research staff and faculty members from across disciplines are usually involved to lend their varied expertise and perspectives to help projects get across the finish line, he adds.

Prof Lam’s efforts to foster close academia-industry collaborations were recognised in 2018 with the Singapore President’s Science and Technology Medal. Earlier, in 2017, he was made a knight in the Legion of Honour, the highest national award bestowed by the French government.

“By combining NTU’s strengths in science and technology with the high-quality resources of leading companies in the world, we can accelerate innovation and research to solve global challenges,” says Prof Lam.

The article appeared first in NTU's research and innovation magazine Pushing Frontiers (issue #23, March 2024).