Schemes For Top Talent
Discover how NRF’s various schemes bring top research talent into Singapore's RIE ecosystem.
Last updated on 4 November 2026
The Returning Singaporean Scientists Scheme and NRF Professorship seek to attract leading overseas-based research leaders to Singapore to take up leadership positions in Singapore’s autonomous universities and publicly funded research institutes. These NRF awards include research grants to facilitate talent in continuing their research uninterrupted after relocating to Singapore.
Both schemes also include a visiting modality, the NRF Visiting Professor, that provides support for travel and honorarium, for eminent researchers to gain greater familiarity with the Singapore research ecosystem and to collaborate more closely with our researchers. Funding for collaboration projects are provided by the Singapore host institution.
Applications for the awards are submitted to NRF through the Autonomous Universities and A*STAR.
Previous awardees include:
Professor Stephen Baker is an internationally recognised leader in bacterial genomics, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), vaccine development and infectious disease epidemiology, with over 25 years of global research leadership. He leads the AMR Domain at A*STAR Infectious Diseases Labs and is Senior Principal Investigator of the Translational Bacteriology Laboratory. His programme aims to deliver first-in-human AMR biologics and deployable interventions that will strengthen Singapore’s infectious disease resilience.
Professor Jay Keasling is Philomathia Distinguished Chair in Alternative Energy at the University of California, Berkeley,Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute. His landmark engineering of microorganisms demonstrated synthetic biology’s power to address global challenges. In Singapore, Professor Keasling leads A*STAR Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Institute – NUS Synthetic Biology Joint Lab, advancing Singapore’s bioeconomy through AI-guided enzyme and pathway engineering.
Professor Khong Pek-Lan is Provost’s Chair at NUS and a clinician-scientist specialising in quantitative imaging biomarkers and molecular imaging. She is Director of the NUS Clinical Imaging Research Centre and Head of Diagnostic Radiology at NUS and National University Hospital.
Professor Rob Knight is an international leader in the study of microbiomes. His work connects microbiological methods with bioinformatics and big data, connecting events in the human gut microbiome to allergy, obesity and other prevalent conditions. Professor Knight will join A*STAR Skin Research Labs as a Visiting Professor from 2026 and contribute to programmes in the Asian skin microbiome and cutaneous microbiome’s impact on inflammatory skin disease and ageing.
Professor Koh Lian Pin is an environmental scientist, having worked in institutions across Switzerland, Australia and USA. He has been appointed the Xu Foundation Dean and Professor, Faculty of Science, National University of Singapore, with effect from 1 July 2026.
Professor Lain-Jong Li is a Distinguished Professor at the National University of Singapore and former Director of Corporate Research at TSMC. His research advances wafer-scale 2D semiconductors and their integration into next-generation, energy-efficient electronics, providing solutions for the post-Moore’s Law era.
Professor Luke Ong Shih-Hao serves as NTU’s Vice President (AI and Digital Economy) and Dean of the College of Computing and Data Science; he is also the Deputy Executive Chairman, AI Singapore (Applied & Translational). A distinguished computer scientist, he works in programming languages, formal methods and AI safety.
Professor Ong Shyue Ping is widely recognised as a pioneer of foundation potentials and a developer of the widely used pymatgen materials library and the Materials Project. He is now Provost's Chair Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at NUS, where he seeks to build AI capabilities that establish Singapore as a place where important new materials are conceived, understood and translated.
Professor Scott Summers is Distinguished Professor and Chair of Nutrition and Integrative Physiology and Co-Executive Director of the Center for Metabolic Health at the University of Utah. His research established that ceramides are causal drivers of diabetes andcardiovascular diseases, creating opportunities for diagnosis and treatment. He plans to collaborate with A*STAR Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology and Singapore’s clinical communities to investigate ceramide biology in Asian populations and integrate mechanistic biology, lipidomics, human genetics, and drug development to strengthen Singapore’s capabilities in metabolic research and translational medicine.
Professor Tao Dacheng is a Distinguished University Professor and the Inaugural Director of the Generative AI Lab in CCDS at NTU. He applies statistical and mathematical methods to advance artificial intelligence, with a current focus on understanding and deploying foundation models and world models, enhancing AI safety, and applying AI to healthcare. His monograph and 300+ publications received over 200K citations.
Professor Yang Changhuei is a pioneer of computational microscopy and wavefront shaping. Formerly Caltech's Thomas G. Myers Professor, he is a Fellow of AIMBE, Optica, and the National Academy of Inventors. His work has been cited 34,000+ times with an h-index of 86, ranking him among the top 1% of scientists worldwide.
Professor Yeo Yee Chia was Director of R&D at TSMC where he co-developed industry-leading 7nm, 5nm, and 3nm technologies, which has impacted the world in areas such as AI. He is now the Deputy Chief Executive at A*STAR and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NUS. He heads Singapore’s RIE2030 Flagship in Semiconductors, leading efforts to deepen Singapore's semiconductor capabilities.