Prof. Hew Choy Leong honoured with the 2019 Outstanding Alumni Award for Academic Achievement

MBI Senior Advisor receives award from Simon Fraser University, Canada

MBI SciComms | OCT 2019

Prof. Hew Choy Leong, Emeritus Professor at NUS and Senior Advisor to the Mechanobiology Institute, was recently honoured with an Outstanding Alumni Award for Academic Achievement from Simon Fraser University, Canada. Simon Fraser University (SFU) was founded in 1965, and Prof. Hew was one of the first intake of 2,500 charter students, graduating with a MSc in 1967. SFU now has more than 160,000 alumni living and working in 140 countries all over the world.

Citation from the Simon Fraser Oustanding Alumni Award:

Hew Choy Leong has had a distinguished career as a scientist, professor, innovator, administrator and humanitarian. He is recognized internationally for his ground-breaking discovery of antifreeze proteins in several cold water fish. This breakthrough led Hew and his collaborators to develop a method to produce rapidly growing transgenic salmon—the only known genetically modified animal to be approved for sale to consumers in Canada and the United States—transforming the aquaculture industry and paving the way for future initiatives to enhance food production worldwide. Hew is one of the founding scientists in AquaBounty Technologies Inc., based in the United States, that is leading this initiative. Hew is now focusing on using a land-based recirculated aquaculture system for salmon farming in China and other Asian countries to promote environmental sustainability and food safety.

Following positions at Memorial University and the University of Toronto, Hew returned to Singapore in 1999 to lead the Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore, transforming it into a vibrant, globally-respected and competitive research unit. He also built academic ties with universities in China and India, created an ASEAN University Network in Biology and established the Mechanobiology Institute, one of only five Research Centres of Excellence in Singapore. Hew has held a number of international appointments and affiliations, supervised 65 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers. His community service extends from supporting Vietnamese refugees in Canada in the 1970s to the training of high school science teachers in Malaysia.

Closer to home, Prof. Hew returned to Singapore in 1999 to lead the Department of Biological Sciences, NUS where he established world-class, multidisciplinary research programmes in proteomics, genomics, structural biology, and bioimaging, and was instrumental in founding the Mechanobiology Institute, a Research Centre of Excellence supported by the National Research Foundation and the Ministry of Education, Singapore.

The NUS News article about the Prof. Hew’s award and the ceremony is available at http://www.dbs.nus.edu.sg/doc/events/news/2019/hewcl.html

For more information on Prof. Hew’s career and the SFU Outstanding Alumni Awards, please visit: http://www.sfu.ca/alumni/news-events/events/2019-OAA.html

For more photos from the awards ceremony see the galleries on Facebook and Flickr. A video profile of Prof. Hew’s life and accomplishments from the SFU Outstanding Alumni Award event can be found on YouTube.