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Seminar

HPTRP Research Seminar

  • Aug 04, 2026 • 1:00 pm
  • Onsite
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Speakers Abstract

Dr Karen Lim Mei Xian

The work that she will be presenting today is from the EaGeR Trial, which was designed to investigate the feasibility and utility of performing early screening for hyperglycaemia in low-risk pregnant women. Recent results from the TOBOGM study published in the NEJM (2023) showed that early treatment of gestational diabetes before 20 weeks results in a lower incidence of adverse neonatal outcomes. This trial aims to investigate if early screening and treatment of GDM in ‘low-risk’ women and those with a family history of diabetes lowers adverse obstetric and neonatal outcomes.

Dr Karen will present the preliminary results of the EaGeR.

Dr Joshua Dao-Wei Sim

How have people in Singapore lived with daily heat stress? What strategies did they use to manage chronic heat stress and maintain good health? To what extent were these heat management strategies shaped by biomedical and Chinese medicine (CM) practices? Based on archival research and oral history accounts, this talk uncovers the history of heat-health in Singapore. Coming from a medical historical perspective, our research shows that biomedicine and CM have been important cultural shapers of everyday heat management in Singapore. Specifically, through an original periodisation of Singapore’s heat-health history that accounts for both biomedical and CM heat-health strains since the early twentieth-century, we make three arguments. Firstly, both biomedicine and CM share a history of heat-health management, but evolved as distinct but connected strains shaped by their own developments. Secondly, though successive governments prioritised biomedicine for institutional heat management, CM remained the primary heat management choice for the general public. Thirdly, despite CM’s secondary role to biomedicine within mainstream healthcare, CM heat management has remained autonomous and grassroots-driven, retaining its unique influences at the community level. In short, this talk highlights the importance of contextualising the two heat-health strains and studying them on their own terms.

Speakers Biosketch

Dr Karen Lim Mei Xian is a Consultant in the Division of Maternal Fetal Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at NUH. Her research endeavors include the care of women with gestational diabetes and prenatal genetic testing and screening. She was a co-investigator in the SPAROW study, a randomized controlled trial on the use of a smartphone app to restore optimal weight in women with recent GDM

Dr Joshua Dao-Wei Sim is a Senior Research Fellow at the Human Potential Translational Research Programme, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. He is a historian of China-Southeast Asia interactions, with a particular focus on heat health and religion. Some of his publications have appeared in Social Science & Medicine, Healthcare, and Urban Climate. Before becoming a historian, Joshua worked as an exercise scientist in the Singapore Armed Forces. Currently, he is working on projects which profile the heat resilience of Singapore residents through physio-ethnography and oral histories.

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