Research Interest
Fung John Chye is Associate Professor of Practice at the College of Design and Engineering (CDE), National University of Singapore (NUS). He is Co-Director, Centre for Environment and Ageing Well (ENgAGE) and Deputy Director, Centre for Sustainable Asian Cities (CSAC), both at CDE, NUS. Prof Fung was also the former Director of the Centre for Ageing Research in the Environment (CARE) where he was the Lead Principal Investigator of an interdisciplinary study funded by the National Research Foundation of Singapore involving detailed research of local nursing homes. The completed study (2021) involved URA, MOH, AIC, MOHH and other agencies, as well as professional architects in developing innovative nursing homes for two pilot sites.
Prof Fung is actively engaged in interdisciplinary research on ageing, dementia, healthcare, community, housing, sustainable and urban planning. His research spans the physical scales of the built environment from macro planning to micro design. Among his completed research are the PLAB Study (2022)—interdisciplinary research for a large township—and Dover Housing Typology Study (2017), both commissioned by URA/MND. Presently he is a core member of the Health District @ Queenstown’s workstream on planning and design, a large interdisciplinary study involving multiple governmental agencies and other stakeholders in Singapore.
His publications cover diverse topics on ageing, nursing homes, dementia, urban neighbourhoods, smart, sustainable and healthy cities. Notably, his design sourcebooks on nursing homes (2014) and dementia (2015) are well received. Prof Fung teaches architecture in the Master of Architecture programme at the Department of Architecture, CDE, NUS. For the past six years, he runs a Master studio series under the theme Future Urban Neighbourhoods (F.U.N.) to investigate and reimagine urban neighbourhoods of the future.
Prior to joining NUS, Prof Fung was a professional architect with close to 30 years of practice experience in a wide range of projects and was a partner of the firm that he co-founded. He served as a Council Member of the Singapore Institute of Architects for many years and has written extensively for the Singapore Architect as its Executive Editor.