Conferment of Provost’s Chair
Published: 12 Oct 2016
Conferment of Provost’s Chair, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine)
Professor Markus R. Wenk, Head of the Department of Biochemistry, NUS Medicine has been appointed as Provost’s Chair at NUS Medicine with effect from 1 October 2016. He is the third appointed Provost’s Chair from NUS Medicine in addition to Professor Nicholas Gascoigne and Professor Bay Boon Huat who were conferred in 2014.
Provost’s Chairs are established to recognise Professors who excel in research quality and impact. Appointees would participate in research, teaching, and service consistent with the norm of the department, and share the collegial responsibilities of the Department and School. They would also contribute to the University’s continuous efforts to strengthen its international standing; and serve as a leading example of scholar achievers comparable to others holding similar positions in the relevant field and at similar stages of career in peer institutions.
Professor Markus R. Wenk excels in research, he has received several research excellence awards, including the NUS Young Investigator Award (2005), NUS Young Researcher Award (2009) and four Faculty Outstanding Researcher Awards (2007, 2009, 2010 & 2015). His research focuses on the application of lipid profiling (“lipidomics”) as a novel and independent approach for the systems level scale analysis of biological systems. To date, he has more than 170 publications, h-index of 53 and more than 10,400 citations. Prof Wenk is an inventor or co-inventor of at least eight patent applications / patents, and principal investigator or co-principal investigator of over 25 research grants with cumulative funding of $25 million since 2004. He has received over 100 invitations from various scholarly events worldwide. He is a distinctive thought leader in the field of lipidomics, being an active contributor of major review articles and peer reviewers for notable journals like Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal Lipid Research, and Journal of Biological Chemistry. In April 2014, Nature.com featured his lipidomic technologies, an affirmation of Prof Wenk’s seminal contribution to this novel technological development, which enables ‘high definition’ insight into complex lipid mixtures that was unavailable 25 years ago. Such information are valuable to various fields of research with the potential of developing therapeutic targets for disease. His achievements have put Singapore on the global map, further strengthened with the establishment of Singapore Lipidomics Incubator (SLING), which is now an internationally – acknowledged programme. Prof Wenk was awarded the 2015 NRF Investigatorship in recognition of excellent research leaders in their respective fields.
In April 2016, Prof Wenk was appointed as Head of the Department of Biochemistry, NUS Medicine. With strong academic background, especially in research, graduate/manpower training and industry partnership, Prof Wenk is expected to elevate the stature of not only the Department, but also of the School and the University.
