Established in 1903, the Rhodes Scholarship, one the world’s preeminent and oldest graduate fellowship, aims to nurture creative young leaders with proven academic excellence who also show exceptional character, leadership and commitment to serve others. One outstanding applicant in Singapore is awarded the scholarship every year, and Dr Ching was selected from among 10 finalists to join 100 scholars from around the world to pursue fully-sponsored postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford in October 2023.

“I am interested in building compassionate healthcare systems centred on the lived experiences of patients and healthcare workers,” says Dr Ching.

Dr Ching co-founded ‘Third Spacing’, a podcast in 2019 with her classmates in medical school to build conversations and raise social consciousness with the aim of improving the medical practice and healthcare access. The podcast has published over 50 episodes currently.

 

In addition to being a clinician and podcaster, she is also a photographer. Her keen eye and heartfelt images which included a personal shot of her own family, won her the top prize in the junior category of a local photography competition.

Through an interdisciplinary Undergraduate Research Opportunity with the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Department of Malay Studies, Dr Ching used autoethnography in Medicine to systematically analyse the uses of race in medicine against the historical background of racial formation during British Colonialism. This culminated in a 50-paged research paper, which she wrote across the clinical years in medical school, and won the Outstanding Understanding Research Prize. The paper has since been presented at local medical education platforms, and also at international social science conferences.

Dr Ching plans to pursue a Master of Philosophy in Medical Anthropology in Oxford come October 2023, hoping to integrate social sciences into clinical practice and research, with writing.