Dr Koh is the first President’s Assistant Professor who joined the Department. He graduated from Nanyang Technological University (Chemistry, First Class Hons) in 2012 before heading to Boston College for his PhD studies, under the supervision of eminent organometallic chemists Prof Amir Hoveyda and Prof Richard Schrock (Nobel Prize ’05).

A recipient of several graduate awards,  Dr Koh has co-authored several research articles in Nature and Science as a young researcher. He was one of the recipients of the NUS Inauguration Grant in 2019.  At NUS Chemistry, his research has been published in reputable scientific journals, including Nature Catalysis, Chem and Journal of the American Chemical Society. Dr Koh’s current research focuses on developing sustainable and enabling catalytic solutions that address critical and unresolved problems in chemical synthesis by homogeneous base metal catalysis, heterogeneous single-atom catalysis and radical chemistry.

Assistant Professor Zhao Ziqing, Winston

Dr Zhao is the second President’s Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry, NUS. He received his pre-university education in Singapore, before heading to Caltech for his undergraduate studies on the National Science Scholarship, where he obtained double B.S. degrees with honors in Chemistry and Biology. He completed his Ph.D. in Biophysics at the Harvard University under the mentorship of Sunney Xie. Since returning to Singapore, he has conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology and the Genome Institute of Singapore, before joining the Department. His research focuses on the development and application of advanced imaging-based approaches to quantitatively probe the biophysical chemistry of chromatin dynamics at the single-cell level. In particular, he is interested in understanding how molecular processes related to chromatin structure, accessibility, and expression are organized and regulated in space and time. By integrating approaches from optical microscopy and spectroscopy, genome and protein engineering, and computational analysis, his work aims to illuminate the physico-chemical driving forces that underpin the spatio-temporal heterogeneities in chromatin dynamics, as well as the physiological implications of their misregulation in human diseases.

Dr Li obtained her Bachelor degree in Biochemistry and Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the National Science Scholarship in 2008. She continued her PhD in Chemical and Systems Biology at Stanford University. She did her post-doctoral studies in the Molecular Engineering Laboratory, A*STAR Singapore under the supervision of the late Nobel Laureate Professor Sydney Brenner.

Dr Li’s research focuses on deciphering at a molecular level how microbial enzymes and their associated molecules structure the human environments they reside. In particular, she aims to define the functions of the microbial community in order to link human microbiome-associated diseases to targetable pathways and mechanisms. Her research has been published in reputable scientific journals, including Nature and Journal of the American Chemical Society.