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Meet Wong Tien Yin, the Hong Kong-born Singaporean involved in China’s quest to grow its academic medicine system
- Renowned ophthalmologist and scientist Wong Tien Yin is the founding head of Tsinghua University’s new health care and medical sciences academy
- In his new role, he hopes to speed research and medicine’s integration in China, and train a new generation to tackle evolving and emerging problems
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When renowned Singaporean ophthalmologist and scientist Wong Tien Yin agreed to take up a position at China’s top Tsinghua University last year, he felt he was making, as he describes it, a major “leap of faith”.
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China’s strict border controls and reduced air travel amid the Covid-19 pandemic meant Wong, 54, could not visit the campus in Beijing or interact in person with any of his colleagues.
Yet, the series of Zoom video interviews with Tsinghua’s leadership impressed him enough that he agreed to be the founding head of Tsinghua Medicine.
The new health care and medical sciences academy aims to train the next generation of professionals to straddle both medical care and biomedical research, equipping them with the skills to tackle evolving and emerging problems.
As a trailblazing clinician-scientist – medical doctors who devote a large portion of their time to scientific research – Wong, who wears numerous hats in Singapore, is well-placed to head the academy.
He won the prestigious President’s Scholarship to study medicine at the National University of Singapore and went on to do a PhD at Johns Hopkins University in the US.
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