Panels

Dr Rena Dharmawan believes that with the right innovation, one can improve the lives of millions at a time. She is a Consultant Surgeon at Department of Head & Neck Surgery in National Cancer Centre Singapore and Singapore General Hospital. Dr Rena also holds a joint appointment as Assistant Dean and Assistant Professor of Innovation Education & Ecosystem Development (IE2D) at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore. Rena is also Co-Director of the recently approved College of Healthcare Engineering in Singhealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Center (AMC).

In 2014, she was one of four nationally-selected fellows in the Singapore-Stanford Biodesign (SSB) Programme, a year-long fellowship that aims to train and nurture the next generation of medical technology innovators for Singapore and Asia. After the fellowship, she co-founded a few Singapore-based medtech startups (Privi Medical, Jaga-Me and CATALYST) and is currently Programme Director for the Duke-NUS Healthcare Innovation Programme (D-HIP) to train & develop the next generation of Clinician- & health-Innovators.

Prior to medicine, Rena graduated summa cum laude with a BSc in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She then joined the inaugural batch and completed her medical degree at Duke-NUS Medical School (Singapore) in 2011 and completed her MBA in January 2023 at INSEAD’s Global Executive MBA programme, where she was named the “Best & Brightest EMBA in 2022” by Poets & Quants.

A/Prof Charlene Liew is the Deputy Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Changi General Hospital and Director of innovation for Radiology, SingHealth. She has held numerous leadership positions in local and international professional bodies, and is the founding chair for the Singapore Radiological Society’s AI subsection.  She co-chairs the National AI- enabled medical imaging platform, also known as “AimSG” and is the founding chairperson for this project.

Dr Gideon Ooi is a dually-specialised Consultant Diagnostic Radiologist at National Cancer Center Singapore and Nuclear Medicine Physician at Singapore General Hospital. Dr Ooi also received the prestigious National Medical Research Council Research Training Fellowship to be among few nationally-selected Innovation Fellows in the Singapore Biodesign Programme that aims to nurture the next generation of medtech innovators for Singapore and Asia. During the fellowship, he underwent clinical immersion at Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital in China, and received training at Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign at Stanford University and at Fogarty Innovation In-stitute in California, USA.

Dr Ooi has research interests in oncologic imaging, radiopharmaceutical theranostics as well as medical artificial intelligence. He is a Core Faculty member of the Nuclear Medicine Senior Residency Programme and Clinical Assistant Professor with Duke-NUS Medical School.

Dr. Alvin Soon is a Consultant Head and Neck Radiologist at Tan Tock Seng Hospital. He is also an Assistant Professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, contributing to undergraduate education in digital health. He strongly believes in an AI-augmented future for medicine and radiology and serves concurrently as the Chair of the Singapore Radiological Society (SRS) – AI and Imaging Informatics Subsection (RADII) as well as on the Executive Committee of SRS. He is currently involved in development, validation and deployment of AI in Diagnostic Radiology. 

Metin Akay received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1981 and 1984, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree from Rutgers University in 1990. He also received an Honorary PhD degree from the Aalborg University, Silesian University of Technology and Pecs University. He also received an Honorary Professor position from the Technical University of Crete.

He is the John S. Dunn professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Houston. He is also the Past President and the Chief Ambassador of IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. He is also Chair of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE) and the Chair of IEEE BRAIN

He established the IEEE EMBS Special Topic Conference on Neural Engineering and furthermore serves on several NIH and NSF review panels. Dr. Akay is a recipient of the IFMBE Zworykin award, IEEE EMBS Career, Early Career and Service awards as well an IEEE Third Millennium Medal and is a fellow of IEEE, the Institute of Physics (IOP), the American Institute of Medical Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

His Neural Engineering and Informatics Lab is interested in developing a novel AI driven Brain Chip for precision medicine and an intelligent wearable system for monitoring and detecting coronary artery disease. In addition, his lab is currently investigating the effect of maternal alcohol and nicotine intake on the health risk in newborns.

Dr. Ali Asgar Bhagat is the Director of the Singapore Health Technologies Consortium (HealthTEC.SG) and Deputy Director (Translation) at the Institute for Health Innovation and Technology (iHealthtech) and Associate Professor (Practice) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at National University of Singapore.  He leads the translation arm of iHealthtech, Healthtech Translation Hub (HATCH), overseeing intellectual property filing, technology development and commercialization, and developing strategic programs to promote the Institute’s mission.  Before NUS, A/Prof. Bhagat was Principal Manager at Accelerate Technologies Pte Ltd, the commercialization arm of Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), in-charge of evaluation and commercialization of biomedical (life sciences and medical device) research output of multiple institutes (>100 patent families).  He was also the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Clearbridge Biomedics Pte Ltd (now Biolidics Ltd), a NUS spin-off developing novel oncology diagnostic solutions. At Clearbridge, he lead the Research and Innovation department overseeing the development of ClearCell® line of products from concept to commercial launch.  Before joining Clearbridge, he worked as Research Scientist in Biosystems and Micromechanics (BioSyM) group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre, Singapore.

A/Prof. Ali Asgar Bhagat received his MS (2006) and PhD (2009) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati, USA and held Associate Scientist position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.

Dr Dang Thuy Tram is Assistant Professor at the School of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (CCEB) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Dr Dang has served as CCEB’s Deputy Director of Industry Outreach and Coordinator of NTU’s Innovation Ignition for Young Entrepreneurs Program. Dr Dang received her B.Sc degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (USA) and Ph.D. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). She also conducted her postdoctoral training as a Controlled Release Society fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School (USA). Dr Dang’s research leverages fundamental understanding of the interaction between biomaterials and the immune systems to design novel immuno-modulatory biomaterials and therapeutic delivery systems for the treatment of chronic diseases with a focus on commercializing and translating innovation into clinically impactful applications.

Dr. Feng is a faculty member at Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health and also the Assistant Director of Research at Institute for Data Science at NUS. He is also the Senior Assistant Director of National University Hospital, championing the big data analytics and AI initiatives. His research is to develop machine learning algorithms to extract actionable knowledge from large amount of data to enable better quality of healthcare. His research brings together concepts and tools across deep learning, optimization, signal processing, statistical causal inference and big data management. Since he joined NUS on 2017, Dr Feng has received over SGD 10 Million research and translation funds as the Lead Principal Investigator, Theme Principal Investigator and Co- Principal Investigator. Dr. Feng’s work was recognized by both well-established journals, such as Lancet Digital Health, Science Translational Medicine, JAMA and top international conferences, such as ICLR, ECCV, KDD, AAAI and AMIA.

Dr. Koh Shuwen possesses a unique set of skills acquired over 15 years of technology commercialisation roles, across fast-paced organisations. These range from working with inventors and founders to grow the value of their IP into investable propositions, start-up restructuring, to pivoting business models for scaling up and sustainability.

Shuwen started her career at the Economic Development Board growing biomedical investments before moving to helm the Singapore office of ImaginAb Inc. In addition to managing the governance and financials of the corporate laboratory, she was able to leverage the networks which she had built in the public sector set up strategic multi-party collaborations.

After ImaginAb, she took on the general manager and corporate strategy role at Endofotonics. Shuwen worked closely with the board to restructure the then-fledging start-up and raised $2M with a new business plan. Endofotonics has since gone on to raise another $12M for clinical development.

In her current roles as Deputy Group Chief Technology Officer and Director of Innovation at NUHS, as well as Director of IP Management and Commercialisation at NUS, Shuwen works with the extended research community to develop practice-changing innovations. She also manages Artemis Pte Ltd, the investment vehicle which supports promising NUHS Healthtech spin offs. Shuwen is passionate about growing Singapore’s innovation and start up ecosystem. Her key areas of focus are to grow the value of the NUHS/NUS IP portfolio and to develop entrepreneurial talent for Singapore and beyond.

Shuwen holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dr Lim is a Senior Ear Nose Throat Surgeon Consultant who started her private clinical practice at Mount Elizabeth Medical Centre in 2014 after 20 years in the public healthcare system in Singapore. She is Visiting Consultant and Adjunct Associate Professor to the National University Health System. Whilst at the NUHS, she pioneered simultaneous bilateral cochlear implant and totally implantable middle ear implant surgeries in Singapore. She was founding director of the Master of Science Audiology program at NUS and the Centre for Hearing Speech and Language and Balance at the NUHS. She is also Founder/ CEO of a 3 year old medical device startup, NousQ. NousQ has developed CLiKX, the world’s first robotic handheld ear tube surgical applicator for treating middle ear infection. With CLiKX, surgeries are moved out of the operating theatre and general anesthesia to a clinic and local anesthesia setting, to mitigate the unmet needs of a 100million more patients.

Raye Yeow is the Dean’s Chair Professor and Deputy Head (Outreach & Industry) at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS). He was a Visiting Professor at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT in 2023, and leads the Soft and Hybrid Robotics Program under Singapore’s National Robotics Programme Office. Raye serves as the President of the Biomedical Engineering Society (Singapore), and the Chair for the Medtech Startup Professionals Community. His research focuses on advancing soft robotics, from uncovering fundamental mechanisms to creating market-ready solutions. With over 200 publications and more than 70 media features, his work has garnered over 40 research and innovation awards. He has co-founded five robotics-AI startups, translating his innovations into healthcare, food assembly, logistics, and extended reality applications.