Faculty Highlights
Dr Petra Silke Pferdmenges
joined the Department of Architecture as a Visiting Associate Professor. Dr Pferdmenges is an architect, researcher, and founder of Alive Architecture. Her practice-based PhD thesis won recognition for outstanding work (2015, RMIT Melbourne, Australia). She has given lectures around the world and taught a variety of design studios that were engaging with actual communities which includes Studio 2030, Bru.S.L.Xl - Living North, Campus City Hanoi, Remix Public Space, Parckfarm Afterlife, Pyblik Masterclass, And Suburban Diaries.
Dr Stephen Cairns
joined the Department of Architecture as a Visiting Professor. Dr Cairns is a Professor of Architecture at ETH Zürich and the Co-​Director of Future Cities Lab (FCL) Global. After completing his PhD, he was appointed to a Lectureship at the University of Melbourne. He took up a Senior Lectureship position at the University of Edinburgh and was appointed as Professor of Architecture and Urbanism in 2009. He had also served as Head of the Department of Architecture, and Director of the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. His practice-oriented research takes the form of the Tropical Town project, a planned/unplanned low-energy, high-density settlement for such urbanising hinterlands, which culminated from a number of research projects funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the Environmental and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Dr Thierry Selim Kandjee
joined the Department of Architecture as a Visiting Associate Professor. Dr Kandjee is a landscape architect and Co-founder of Taktyk. He holds the landscape chair at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta in Brussels. His research revolves around the investigation of the public role of the practice, acting as a gardener urbanist, conductor-orchestrator and enabler of complex transformation processes.
Dr Maxime Decaudin
joined the Department of Architecture as a Senior Lecturer on 3 October 2022. He lectures on landscape architecture in the undergraduate and master programmes with a focus on history and theory. He completed a PhD in Art History at Sorbonne Université titled ‘A Barren Rock’: An Environmental History of Hong Kong Landscapes under British Colonization, 1794-1898. His research examines the historical agency of nature in Asian contexts. Maxime received his Bachelor and Master degrees from École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris and is a licensed French architect. Before joining NUS, Maxime taught landscape architecture at the University of Hong Kong for ten years. In 2019, he was an emerging curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and in 2017, he was a doctoral fellow at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC).
Dr Tedrick Thomas Salim Lew
joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) as a Presidential Young Professor. Prior to joining NUS, he was a Postdoctoral Research and Group Leader at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) where he worked on plant nanotechnology research. He held a concurrent appointment as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in ChBE. Tedrick earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering (Minor in Finance) in 2020 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his MEng in Chemical Engineering in 2014 at the Imperial College London. Tedrick's research interest focuses on engineering plant-based technologies by combining approaches from nanotechnology and plant science. He aims to engineer sustainable functional materials from living plants and nanomaterials.
Dr Lin Yiliang
joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as an Assistant Professor in November 2022. Before joining NUS, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the James Franck Institute Department of Chemistry, University of Chicago, USA. Dr Lin received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2018. His research focuses on designing and developing living materials using soft matter engineering and bio-interface design. Living materials are self-regenerative, adaptable, and bio-integrative, which makes them promising for biomedical and sustainable applications. Over the past three years, he helped establish several new research directions in his postdoctoral groups and he has published more than 30 peer-reviewed publications in journals so far, collaborating with researchers from diverse backgrounds, including chemists, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, medical doctors, physicists, and material scientists.
Dr Ahmet Avsar
joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as an Assistant Professor on 15 September 2022. He was recently awarded the National Research Foundation Fellowship (Class of 2022) to start a new research initiative in Singapore focusing on unconventional spin transport in layered quantum materials for low-power electronics. Prior to joining NUS, Dr Avsar was an Assistant Professor of Physics at Newcastle University (United Kingdom) and worked as an EPFL Fellow (co-funded by the European Marie Curie COFUND programme) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) between 2016 and 2020 after completing his PhD in Physics at NUS. During this prior research, his experimental work on two-dimensional heterostructure-based devices has resulted in several breakthroughs in spin, exciton, and novel charge transport phenomena.Â
Dr Alexey Berdyugin
joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as a Presidential Young Professor. Dr Berdyugin studied at the Moscow Phystech from 2010 to 2016, where he received his bachelor and master degrees in condensed matter physics. He completed doctoral research at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Sir Andre Geim and Professor Irina Grigorieva. He focused on the transport properties of novel van der Waals materials during his research studies. He received his PhD in Nanoscience in May 2020. Dr Berdyugin worked in United Kingdom and focused on a non-linear current propagation regime in novel 2D superlattices. He was recently awarded the prestigious early carrier fellowship in UK but decided to move to Singapore.
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Dr Tan Xipeng
started a new position in the Department of Mechanical Engineering as a tenure-track Assistant Professor on 1 November 2022, after having served previously as a Research Assistant Professor. Before joining NUS, he completed postdoctoral training in atom probe tomography and metal additive manufacturing at IM2NP CNRS & Aix-Marseille University and Nanyang Technological University, respectively. He received his PhD in materials science from the Institute of Metal Research (Shenyang), Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests include microstructural engineering, high-performance metal additive manufacturing and high-throughput materials discovery.