Singapore is offering big money and five years of guaranteed research funding to woo back top Singaporean scientists and engineers from overseas and help the city state become a global research and development powerhouse.
The Returning Singaporean Scientists Scheme launched last month by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, aims to encourage leading researchers in their field globally to take up leadership positions in Singapore.
Announcing the initiative on 25 October at the conclusion of Singapores Seventh Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council meeting, Lee said the scheme was geared to anchor research capabilities and grow Singapores core in RD.
Although Singapore had strong research capabilities and a pipeline of researchers, Lee said: Well need good people, good research programmes and then well be able to get good research outcomes.
Scientists may choose to start as visiting fellows before converting to staff positions, or take up full-time employment immediately with the host Singaporean university or research institutions offering them a competitive package. Scientists will also receive five years of funding support from the National Research Foundation.
Since 2010, increasing numbers of Singaporean scientists have started to drift back home seeing better opportunities than elsewhere.
Overall, government expenditure on scientific RD jumped almost 10-fold in two decades, from SGD760 million (US$610 million) in 1991 to SGD6 billion (US$4.8 billion) in 2009. The government has set aside another SGD16.1 billion for the next five years, up 20% from the commitment in the previous five-year plan.
More opportunities
Dr Daniel New Tze How left Singapore in 2005 for postdoctoral research at the University of Texas, after obtaining a PhD from the National University of Singapore, or NUS.
He then joined Englands University of Liverpool as a lecturer in engineering, collaborating with the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in flow dynamics research. But he returned to Singapore in 2010 to research aircraft wing design at Nanyang Technological Universitys aerospace engineering division.
Research funding in Singapore is very good compared to the UK, New said. My wife and I had considered settling down in the US, UK or Europe, and coming back to Singapore was not in my mind, but when I looked at Singapore [in 2010], I felt it was a good place to advance my career, New told University World News.
Many people thought Singapore did not have an aerospace industry, he added. But there was a lot of government support for research: Many industry players have come to Singapore to set up shop so there is a demand for aerospace engineers and, in the next five to 10 years, theres a lot of scope for us to set up the engineering capacity here.
Even though the indigenous aerospace industry was still small, there are signs of it growing. Im sure at some stage we will venture into local aerospace design, New said.
Singapore has spent billions of dollars in recent years setting up research centres for biotechnology, aerospace engineering, water technology and medical sciences, mainly attached to the National University and Nanyang. Many are headed by top scientists head-hunted from western universities.
But, with Singapores population increasingly unhappy about the influx of foreign talent, the government appears to be implementing a subtle policy shift, experts say. With the right opportunities, its own people could stay on and help build a Singaporean scientific community that could be world-class in time to come.
Medical Sciences
Medical sciences is another area where Singapore has invested heavily in the past few years. More than SGD1.49 billion (US$1.2 billion) has been poured into medical RD as part of Singapores project to become Asias Biopolis. Another SGD3.7 billion will be invested in the sector in the period 2011-15.
Dr Roger Sik Yin Foo is among the 7,000 scientists involved in biomedical research in Singapore. A cardiologist with a medical degree from the NUS, he left for postgraduate studies in the UK in the mid-1990s and stayed on because of the research opportunities, doing research in the fields of genes, cell culture and stem cells.
At that time there was very little emphasis on research in Singapore, Foo told University World News.
He was conducting research at Cambridge University but was lured home in 2012. Last year I realised that while I was keeping my head down and doing research in my little silo in Cambridge, Singapore has gone so far ahead in technology, funding and the whole atmosphere for research and enthusiasm as well.
He sees greater opportunities for research advancement in Singapore. In the West, generally there is a bit of sluggishness. People are a bit disillusioned, funding is harder to find, you see labs closing down, professors being made redundant…
Singapore is particularly keen on my breed of clinicians called clinician-scientists because we do both science research and see patients. The traditional medical school training here does not cater for this training and that is what they are looking to change, said Foo, who now leads a cutting-edge cardiovascular research team in one of Singapores leading biomedical research institutes connected to the NUS teaching hospital, and is also conducting his own research in epigenetics, looking at finding pathways on what controls heart failure.
To some extent research in the West is focused on western disease patterns. At NUS [hospital] we are looking at Asian patients and trying to understand how different they are our arteries are smaller and narrower than Westerners, genetic markers remain to be seen; these are early days of research, he said.
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