BLAZING BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH TRAIL IN S'PORE

Renowned scientist breaks new ground at 59

- Shabana Begum

Professor Jackie Ying, a pint-sized dynamo never seen without her signature headscarf, dark suit and track shoes, has always lived life on her terms.

As she approaches 60, she has again met change head-on.

The world-renowned nanotech scientist has relocated from Singapore—where she spent two decades as one of the pioneers transforming the nation into a research powerhouse—to Saudi Arabia.

Prof Ying has given up all she has accomplished here to move to the Middle East, where she is building a laboratory in Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh to advance novel diagnostics and treatments in genetic diseases, which are particularly prevalent there.

It is yet another milestone in a career of many firsts for the Taiwan-born, US-trained scientist.

"I'm really excited. I feel 20 years younger because of all these new things I want to do," she told The Straits Times.

"Physically, I think I'm running after myself because of the excitement of my lab and the collaborators."

The plan is to help advance Saudi Arabia's budding biomedical scene, as Prof Ying did for Singapore many years ago.

Blazing a Trail in Singapore

Prof Ying, 59, is among a pool of top researchers, coined "whales," who were wooed here from all over the world more than two decades ago by then A*Star chairman Philip Yeo to turn Singapore into a biomedical hub. Among other achievements, she helped to establish Biopolis.

One of the youngest people to make full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the age of 35, she moved to Singapore in 2003 to become the founding director of A*Star's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), which has since been merged with a consortium to form the A*Star Institute of Bioengineering and Bioimaging.

In 2018, Prof Ying and her team built A*Star's NanoBio Lab, a research incubator, from scratch.