Speech by Chief Defence Scientist and Chief Research and Technology Officer Quek Tong Boon at the Temasek Research Fellowship and Nanyang-DSO Post-Doctoral Fellowship Award Ceremony

Permanent Secretary (Defence Development), Dr Tan Kim Siew
Provost NTU, Prof Bertil Andersson,
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,
Good afternoon.

Welcome to the inaugural awards ceremony for the Temasek Research Fellowship and Nanyang-DSO Postdoctoral Fellowship. In the interest of time and brevity, I will refer to them as TRF and NDPD respectively for the rest of my speech.

I am very pleased that slightly more than a year after we launched the two fellowships, we are gathered here this afternoon for the awards to the first TRF recipient and the first NDPD recipient. Both fellowships aim to seek out and provide opportunities for outstanding post-doctorate researchers from both Singapore and abroad to work on defence related research in Singapore. Based on the more than 50 outstanding applications from more than 10 countries that we received in response to our first round of calls for these fellowships, we are off to a good start in fulfilling this objective.

For us, defence R&;D is a long-term commitment. We have been at it for nearly four decades. Just as many of the cutting-edge capabilities that the SAF enjoys today are possible only because of our R&D investments in the past, we need to continue to invest in defence R&D to ensure that the SAF of tomorrow continues to be at the cutting edge. Such a long-term commitment enables us to take a full-spectrum perspective of our R&D investments. Our research investment creates fresh technology options for us. Every new technology we create adds to our portfolio of special building blocks that allow us to build special systems, which in turn enable us to develop special capabilities for our defence that we cannot buy.

The partnerships that we have with both universities are long-standing and strategic as we consider both institutions very much part of our defence ecosystem. They have grown from strength to strength because all three parties recognise their value. For MINDEF, they enable us to tap on talent in our academia for upstream research and education. For both NTU and NUS, I believe that the defence sector continues to provide very challenging and hard problems to enable their faculty and researchers to push the frontiers of science, engineering and technologies in exploring solutions for our problems. Compared to the non-defence arena, our demands are usually for devices, products and systems that are lighter, more hardy, more durable, more secure, more stealthy and more portable. Through both the TRF and NDPD schemes, we hope to create even more technology building blocks to solve our hard problems and enable new capabilities and concepts that would not otherwise be possible.

The TRF research fellow will work in either NTU or NUS. He will have the opportunity to exercise technical and thought leadership as a principal investigator, pursue pioneering research in his TRF area and shape its development in Singapore. For the TRF, the duration is for three years with an option to renew for another three years. The NDPD is very similar to TRF in but it is an arrangement we have only with NTU. It is for two years with an offer of an academic appointment at NTU for suitable candidates. We believe that either of the arrangements with give our TRF and NDPD fellows ample time, resources and intellectual space to build a substantial capability and establish a strong track record in their areas of specialisation.

We also hope that through both the TRF and NDPD schemes, we can better connect our ecosystem to the global creative network of research talents and tap on them to pursue pioneering research in Singapore. We hope that our TRF and NDPD fellows could in turn inspire more Singaporeans to take up studies and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

It is my pleasure to announce that our first TRF recipient is a Ukrainian scientist, Dr Oleg Vasylkiv and our first NDPD recipient is a Singaporean scientist, Dr Edwin Teo. Dr Oleg's research work will be on nano-composites to create a new class of materials that are harder and yet lighter. Dr Teo will be looking at new ways of manipulating carbon - an old material that we are all familiar with, to create a new class of materials with tunable electrical and mechanical properties. If successful, their work will open up new and exciting possibilities for applications that could be relevant to defence.

With the experience of the first round of TRF and NDPD calls behind us, we have already worked with both NUS and NTU to initiate the second round of calls for next year's TRF and NDPD in the areas of biomimicry, cognitve science, cybersecurity, computational photography and microsystem technologies.

In closing, may I take the opportunity to congratulate both the inaugural recipients of the TRF and NDPD. Both the research areas that you would be working on hold great promise for high payoff applications in defence. Your success in working these areas would therefore be our success. I therefore look forward to following the progress of your work with great interest.

May I also take to once again thank both NUS and NTU for being our partners in the TRF
and NDPD initiatives.

Thank you.