Our congratulations to Assoc Prof Markus R Wenk (PI), Department of Biochemistry & Department of Biological Sciences, & OLS Neurobiology/Ageing Programme, for being among the first group of researchers to be awarded a grant under the National Research Foundation’s Competitive Research Programme (CRP) Funding Scheme.

The CRP Funding Scheme, which was approved at the Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council (RIEC) meeting chaired by the Prime Minister on 16 March 2007, offers funding support of up to S$10 million per programme, over three to five years. The aim of the CRP Funding Scheme is to help identify potential strategic research areas in which Singapore can invest to develop new industries for the future, by funding a broad base of research ideas at the programme level and facilitating a more integrated and sustained way of supporting high-impact interdisciplinary research. [READ MORE]

The Bioinformatics Programme will be co-hosting a week of symposia on bioinformatics and computational biology (AASBI2007, GIW2007, and LBM2007) from 2 to 7 December 2007 at the Biopolis. [READ MORE]

The Structural Biology and Proteomics Reasearch (SBPR) Programme 2007 and the Infectious Disease Programme (IDP) 2007 jointly organised a symposium on Saturday, 17 November 2007 at the Department of Biological Sciences Conference Room. Despite the day being a Saturday, the symposium was attended by 35 participants involving staff, students and postdocs from both programmes. [READ MORE]

The CeLS Safety SOPs were put in place on 17 August . Since then, OLS has taken repeated measures to communicate these SOPs to all working in CeLS. We have started conducting monthly inspections to ensure that the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) have been been adopted and observed.

We are also preparing to apply for NUS Annual Safety & Health Performance Award (ASHPA) Scheme and the NUS Safety & Health Improvement Projects (SHIP) Scheme in December. We invite all those working in CeLS to share their ideas for developing new SHIP for next year.

We have also had a Petroleum Flammable Materials audit by an external party and are awaiting the results of the audit.

Our simple measures to conserve energy has been very successful as can be seen from the lower electricity bills for the past three months. We thank you for your efforts in our drive to conserve energy.

To celebrate the year end festivities, OLS is organizing a year end party on Friday, 14 December 2007 at the CeLS foyer from 11.30 am to 2.30 pm. The OLS Executive Committee would like to extend an invitation to all Programmes to come together for this event. This is an excellent opportunity for all to get together!

OLS is pleased to highlight some of the new Programme Leaders who have been appointed to head the OLS Programmes. In this issue we are pleased to feature Prof Ong Choon Nam (Toxicology Programme) and Assoc Prof Chang Young-Tae (Medicinal Chemistry Programme).

Professor Ong Choon Nam, OLS Toxicology Programme Leader

He teaches the Master of Public Health Module and Life Sciences Module. He is now concurrently the Deputy Director of the Office of Life Sciences. [READ MORE]

Professor Chang Young-Tae, OLS Medicinal Chemistry Programme Leader

After one and half years of army service in Korea, he started his graduate study at POSTECH and received a Ph.D. in 1997 under the supervision of Prof. Sung-Kee Chung, working on the divergent synthesis of all possible regioisomers of myo-inositol phosphates. [READ MORE]

The 3^rd Tohoku-NUS Joint Symposium 2007 on Nano-Biomedical Engineering in the East Asian-Pacific Rim Region will be held from 10-11 December 2007 at CeLS NUS. For more information, please click here.