NUS Medicine's target? To be world's top medical school for Asia

School well-placed to develop relevant, effective solutions for Asian communities, says dean

- Salma Khalik

The NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine is one of the world's best medical schools—and it is not the one saying it.

For the past six years, it has ranked among the world's top 20 medical schools in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings—at 17th in 2025. In 2024 and 2025, it ranked 18th in the QS World University Rankings for medicine.

But the school's dean, Professor Chong Yap Seng, wants more than that. He wants it to become the world's leading medical school to represent Asia on the global stage.

He said the school is well-positioned to produce Asia-contextualised research and knowledge to develop solutions that are relevant and effective for Asian communities. The top medical schools in the world today are largely American or European, and they cannot be counted on to understand and research Asian patterns of disease. This is reflected in medical literature that is based on Western perspectives and derived from Western research efforts.

Prof Chong wants to demonstrate that NUS Medicine and Asia can lead in setting new standards for medical education, research, health and healthcare, and most importantly, to be able to shape the future of global health.

He aims to do that by focusing the school's efforts on optimising health, moving beyond the treatment of disease and truly leveraging digital technology, data and artificial intelligence to unlock the value of health data.

This is not simply to have a claim to fame, he insisted. "Asians are quite different in the way they respond to drugs."

As an example, he cited warfarin, a common blood thinner used to prevent blood clots that could cause strokes or heart attacks. "If you give the normal dose for Caucasians to Singaporeans, they will probably bleed to death," he said.

Asians need, on average, half to two-thirds the dose given to Caucasians.