Dean's Chair Associate Professor Vincent Tan (NUS Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Mathematics, NUS Faculty of Science) and Associate Professor Yan Ning (NUS Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) received the Young Researcher Award at this year's NUS University Awards held on 28 May at the NUS University Cultural Centre. They were among the eight individuals honoured for exemplary contributions to education, research and service.
The accolades were presented in four categories: Outstanding Service Award, Outstanding Educator Award, University Research Recognition Award and Young Researcher Award.
The Young Researcher Award is conferred on researchers below 40 years of age based on their impact and promise in research. The award carries a prize money of $2,000 and a research grant of $10,000 in the following year, subject to NUS' grant guidelines.
Below are the key research achievements of Associate Professor Vincent Tan and Associate Professor Yan Ning:
Associate Professor Vincent Tan
- Known internationally for his works on finite-length fundamental limits in networks which shape the design of low-latency communication systems
- Established an impossibility result for pointto-point communication systems that matches Strassen's achievable result from the 1960s. No communication protocol can improve on this performance bound. Also derived similarly stunning results for multiuser networks together with his collaborators
- New mathematical theorems constitute byproducts of these analyses and are applicable to machine learning tasks such as the estimation of graphical networks from data
- Raised research grants of $3 million from the National Research Foundation (NRF), Ministry of Education, Institute of Data Science, JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science)-NUS and Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Associate Professor Yan Ning
- One of three winners who received the annual ACS (American Chemical Society) Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering Lectureship Award 2018 for pioneering the "waste shell biorefinery" concept
- First and only recipient from Asia to date to be recognised with the RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry) Environmental, Sustainability and Energy Early Career Award in 2017 for his innovative research on the valorization of wastes through rational catalyst
- Led an international team in developing a chemical synthesis route of various amino acids from sugars, paving the way for the production of high-value proteins from agricultural wastes via chemical routes in the future
- Developed highly efficient single atom metal catalysts, addressing the high temperature stability issue of such catalysts that has long been a critical challenge in the field
- Raised research grants of $2.55 million from the National Research Foundation, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, Ministry of Education, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, UNESCO and NUS, among others
