Dear Colleagues, Students and Alumni,

I am writing to express my sincere gratitude to all of you for your contributions to Duke-NUS during the past year. As 2018 comes to a close, I want to take this opportunity to review our accomplishments and reflect on our aspirations for the future.

Through a process of reflection and dialogue, we have refreshed the vision, mission and values of our School. The aspirational vision for Duke-NUS of transforming medicine, improving lives will be accomplished by executing our mission of nurturing clinical innovators and translating discovery into better health. Accordingly, we aim to educate pioneering clinicians, innovate to enhance health and inspire excellence. Moreover, with our team of dedicated staff, talented researchers, committed faculty and passionate students, Duke-NUS will continue to bring impactful outcomes to the healthcare landscape in Singapore and beyond.

This year, our education team worked hard to re-structure the MD curriculum to better prepare our students for clinical practice and reinforce our commitment of nurturing our students with a goal of producing "Clinicians First-Clinicians Plus”: outstanding clinicians who bring something extra to the practice of medicine. The refreshed curriculum, along with the diversity and expertise of our faculty and our strategic partnership with SingHealth Cluster are powerful assets for promoting high quality medical education and we must ensure that we leverage these resources to continue to produce outstanding clinicians for Singapore. In this regard, a number of our alumni were recognized in the past year with local and national awards including Dr Ku Chee Wai (Class of 2013) who received the National Outstanding Clinician Scientist Resident Award 2018, along with thirteen alumni who received 2018 Residency in SingHealth Excels (RiSE) Awards across various categories including the Quality Improvement Project Award, the Inspiring Resident-Educator Award, and the Resident Committee Appreciation Award.

Our researchers continue to excel in transforming the way we understand, diagnose and treat diseases impacting public health in Singapore. This has resulted in continued impressive successes in publications, securing competitive funding, and commercializing discoveries, facilitating translation of the benefits of our research into the public domain. During the past year, a few of these individuals were recognized by prestigious awards including Professor Stuart Cook who received the President’s Technology Award 2018 for his innovative work in diagnosing and managing human heart failure, the team of investigators from Duke-NUS and the National Cancer Centre, led by Profs Patrick Tan, Steve Rozen, and Teh Bin Tean who were the first Asian team to be awarded the prestigious American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Team Science Award, and Professor Patrick Casey, our Senior Vice-Dean for Research, who received the Duke Medical Alumni Association’s Distinguished Faculty Award 2018, recognizing his global leadership and excellence in medical research and education.

I have also been delighted to see our Academic Medicine partnership with SingHealth continue to grow stronger and flourish in the past year. The new AMC Link Bridge connecting the Khoo Teck Puat Building with Academia provides a concrete and tangible manifestation of this enduring partnership. In addition, the SingHealth Duke-NUS Global Health Institute (SDGHI) was launched in September 2018 with Professor Michael Merson as Director, with the objective of advancing regional and global health through research, education and clinical care, providing another example of the vibrancy of the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre.

In conclusion, I would like to congratulate all of you - our researchers, students, faculty and staff – for another superb year. All of our achievements in 2018 were made possible through your hard work and dedication. I am very grateful to each one of you for your contributions to Duke-NUS.

Best wishes for the season, and may 2019 be another terrific year for you and your loved ones.

With my warmest regards,

Professor Thomas Coffman
Dean
Duke-NUS Medical School