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Singapore is a unique environment for research and one that has become a global phenomenon and model for a country truly embracing the concept of the knowledge-based economy. Over the first 10 years of the 21st century, Singapore has advanced into the “Ivy League” of research by a sustained and high investment in research both in government research institutes, notably those of the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research A Star , and in the university sector. Unusually, for a country with its population of approximately 4.5 million, there are only four universities in Singapore with one only very recently established with two of these being very major and successful institutions, of which Nanyang Technological University NTU is one. It is a relatively young university still undergoing rapid evolution and development, yet has consistently been ranked among the top 100 universities worldwide. In the most established ranking system for universities that of the Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings , there are no younger universities in the top 100 category. It was originally founded in 1955 as a privately funded university Nanyang University teaching in Chinese and was the only such institution outside China and Taiwan. It aimed at serving the Chinese diaspora in South East Asia and it still retains strong links in China itself. Nanyang University was merged with the University of Singapore in 1980 to form the National University of Singapore NUS —the other major tertiary level institution—and in 1981, it was reformed as the Nanyang Technological Institute with the objective of providing training and education of engineering manpower and with the medium of instruction being English, the language of government and business in Singapore. It became a fully fledged university with its own charter in 1991. Since then, NTU has moved consistently and rapidly into the top echelon of high performing research intensive universities, especially during the 2000s Fig. 1 . Over the recent past, it has become a much more comprehensive university but still with engineering at its core and, indeed, engineering in all its guises remains two-thirds of the institution. As such, it is probably the world’s largest engineering-based institution on a single campus. Its route toward enlarging its portfolio started with the addition of the Nanyang Business School, now the top rated school in Singapore and also considered one of the best schools in the Asia-Pacific region. More recently, the addition of the College of Science, although new, is developing rapidly with a very international faculty, and the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences with a School of Art, Design, and Media housed in one of the university’s many iconic buildings, see Fig. 2 , Singapore’s only school of journalism, have added greatly to the educational and research opportunities at the university and provided the basis for a complex web of interdisciplinary activities. NTU includes the National Institute of Education NIE , responsible for the education and training of all of Singapore’s school teachers at all levels, and the Rajeratnam School of Strategic and International Studies RSIS , a graduate school and think-tank concentrating on security and, again, very highly regarded both in the region and globally. The move toward a more comprehensive institution will be completed following Prime Minister Lee’s announcement August 2010 that NTU has been entrusted with a new medical school, a joint venture offering a joint qualification with Imperial College London, which has also developed a medical school on what is a predominantly engineering base. Imperial College is now the largest medical school and hospital administrator within the British university medical system. NTU has also gained ground in other areas as we host two out of the five nationally awarded and prestigious Research Centres of Excellence RCEs —the Earth Observatory of Singapore EOS and the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences and Engineering SCELSE . The university is also a partner in one of the other RCEs— Mechanobiology—hosted at the NUS. The RCE scheme itself has promoted the rapid evolution of Singapore into the upper ranks in the world “league” of research in selected areas. For example, in 2007, top level Earth sciences hardly existed in the region, but by attracting world-leading researchers such as Kerry Sieh from California Institute of Technology Caltech Fig. 3 , Paul Tapponnier from Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, and Chris Newhall from the U.S. Geological Survey a “dream team” of tectonicists and volcanologists , together with more than $S200 million in funding for EOS, we have leap-frogged into the premier league of Earth science research and embedded these new disciplines within the university in establishing a new division of Earth and environmental sciences.

Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University—A young country with a young university on the move