If you visit a doctor in Singapore for a consultation, chances are your doctor will be a graduate of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine). Since the School’s establishment in 1905, NUS Medicine has graduated 12,456 men and women. Numbers alone don’t mean much: many of our graduates are doing good and great work in the community and even abroad. Let me share three examples of this.

Moved by the struggles that adults with intellectual disabilities (IDs) experience in trying to access healthcare, Dr Chen Shiling (Class of 2005) established the non-profit Happee Hearts Movement and IDHealth in 2014. The latter is a full-service clinic staffed by doctors, nurses, social workers and allied health professionals serving adults with IDs. Many of these patients have mobility and sensory processing difficulties that make it difficult for them to articulate their needs to healthcare workers, even as their families struggle with the demands of caring for them. The clinic is working with healthcare and academic institutions to include palliative and dementia care as well as preventive health, said Dr Chen, who was named The Straits Times Singaporean of the Year 2025 in March this year.

Dr Glen Liau Zi Qiang (Class of 2012) and his team at Alexandra Hospital designed a patented, surgical-grade stainless steel intra-incisional tibial pin guide jig, designed to accurately personalise pin positioning and trajectory for each patient undergoing robotic knee replacement surgery. Where four tracker pins had to be inserted into a patient’s thigh and shin bones to enable the robot to accurately map the surgical site, the tool only requires a single incision, through which all four pins are inserted and later removed. This novel device reduces the risk of bones fracturing, bleeding and infection.

Her undergraduate experiences volunteering on short humanitarian missions motivated Dr Deborah Khoo (Class of 2014) to look for opportunities to serve on longer duration assignments overseas. For three months in 2024, she was part of a Medicins Sans Frontieres medical team based in a trauma unit in Kunduz, north Afghanistan. “I’m not the first or only doctor from Singapore to do this—far from it,” she said in a recent news interview. “Many of us go because we want to serve. Living and working in Singapore, it’s easy to believe the world is orderly, safe and predictable. But it’s not. Even those of us who’ve travelled widely may not grasp how chaotic the world can be.”

The efforts of NUS Medicine alumni like Drs Chen, Liau and Khoo are also helping to progressively move the needle towards a lifespan zone marked by longer and healthier lives for Singaporeans. While life expectancy in 2024 rose to 83.5 years, living longer is only one half of the equation. I have shared previously that NUS Medicine is at the forefront of scientific work to increase the healthspan of Singaporeans. In this edition, you can read about the new as well as continuing efforts to help people stay healthy as they age, such as the discovery that natural metabolite calcium alpha-ketoglutarate (CaAKG) may help restore key memory-related brain functions disrupted by Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the identification of a key protein that could reverse ageing.

The practice of Medicine centres fundamentally on human health and wellness, and partnering with international institutions is paramount in the School’s efforts to drive preventive health. We recently launched the NUS-IHME Global Burden of Disease Research Centre, a new regional hub which aims to provide analysis for the region, generating actionable data and policy insights on population health and disease burden. To uncover how sleep and physical activity influence population health in the long term, our Centre for Sleep and Cognition has also established a joint lab with the Finnish smart ring maker, ŌURA.

At NUS Medicine, competent, compassionate, committed staff and alumni are working ceaselessly to close the gap between longevity and health. Thanks to them, all of us can look expectantly forward to the time when our length of years is marked by vigour and vitality.

Yours sincerely,