Mr Saravanan Gunaratnam, Head, Occupational Safety & Health Management Division Office of Safety, Health and Environment, also gave an overview of the Occupational Health & Safety Management System.

Dr Viji Vijayan, Scientific Manager, OLS, also shared with the audience on the OLS sharepoint where safety related and relevant documents will be made available for all CeLS occupants. Access can only be granted to NUS staff and students with NUS email accounts and those who work in CeLS. Please contact Aziz at azizs@nus.edu.sg for access to the sharepoint. Please click on the URL https://share.nus.edu.sg/ols/cels_matters/default.aspx to access the sharepoint.

If there are relevant documents which you wish to post on the sharepoint, you may send them to Viji Vijayan who will review the document and upload it.

Dr Viji Vijayan (standing at left) responding to a question by
an audience while Mr Saravanan Gunaratnam (standing at
right) looks on.

In addition to the OLS sharepoint, a discussion board has been created. It could be used to discuss work-related issues, to exchange ideas and experiences, provide feedback and even share reagents, especially those with short shelf lives. We hope to see a high level of activity at this sharepoint.

OLS will continue to provide you more such facilities in the future.

The 1^st Weizmann Institute of Science-Singapore Joint Workshop 2007 was held in Rehovot, Israel from 6-9 August 2007. It was attended by a delegation of scientists from NUS, Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), as well as many colleagues from the Weizmann Institute of Science. The Singapore group was led by Prof Hew Choy Leong, Director OLS. It comprised ten Principal Investigators, one post-doc and one graduate student. [READ MORE]

The RUNX International Conference for 2007 was held in Singapore, at the Biopolis, from 20 – 23 August 2007. This annual meeting is the 14^th of its kind and this year, 50 international and local speakers presented their latest work. The conference attracted close to 150 participants. This year, the conference was organised by the Oncology Research Institute/Cancer Programme led by Dr Yoshiaki Ito, who is also one of the founders of the RUNX family of genes. The original founding members, together with a group of scientists that have grown rapidly over the years, have held annual meetings in the US, Japan, UK and Korea, and for the first time here in Singapore in 2007. [READ MORE]

Arising from the successful bilateral workshop on developmental and cell biology between NUS and the Weizmann Institute (WI), Israel in early August 2007, there is now a strong interest from WI to participate in research collaboration here in Singapore under the frame work of CREATE. One of the possible research programmes being considered by WI and Singapore is Synthetic Biology which deals with the design and manipulation of model organisms and some of the platform technologies for large scale mutagenesis and screening, among others.

Several senior PIs from WI are coming to Singapore from 16 to 18 October 2007. Any staff or PI who may be interested to collaborate under this proposed programme can provide a title and a short description of your research interest or topic, and send them to Ellice Lim (olslime@nus.edu.sg) of OLS by 20 September 2007. Please also contact Ellice for further information.

OLS will organize an internal workshop based on the responses received some time in Oct 2007 so that a fruitful discussion can be made with the WI team. Our intention is to make a joint presentation to NRF later.

Biomedical researchers can now look forward to accessing state-of-the-art imaging tools with the establishment of the Clinical Imaging Research Centre (CIRC) in NUS. This is a joint collaboration between NUS, A*STAR and Siemens Medical Solutions. [READ MORE]

The organizers of the AACR meeting in Singapore on “Translational Cancer Medicine – Technologies to Treatment” scheduled for 4-8 November 2007, have offered a group registration rate of US$250 (approx. S$380) per person if there is a minimum group of at least 30 people from NUS. If you are interested to attend this meeting, please forward your name, designation, department/programme, email & telephone contacts to:

Ms Selena Gan
Manager, ORI/Cancer Programme
Email – nmiv29@nus.edu.sg