Innovators in Singapore Blaze on EmTech Singapore’s 2015 Innovators Under 35 Regional List

19 November 2014 – SINGAPORE – EmTech Singapore has announced the 10 regional honourees from Southeast Asia and Australia/New Zealand that are now eligible for consideration on the 15^th annual MIT Technology Review magazine’s 35 Innovators Under 35 (TR35) list, due in October 2015. Eight of the ten honourees are either based in Singapore or work in Singaporean research institutes. Their work showcases how the nation is trailblazing the next generation of state-of-the-art scientific and technological innovation in the region.

As a finalist, each has the opportunity to present a three-minute elevator pitch about their research to an elite audience of market leaders, researchers and investors at EmTech Singapore, for which the second edition will be held 27-28 January 2015.

Selected from a pool of over 100 applicants, from 16 countries, the finalists selected by an esteemed panel of judges are:

1. Rikky Muller, Chief Executive Officer, Cortera Neurotechnologies, Inc; Rikky founded Cortera Neurotechnologies to develop implantable devices that will enable prosthetics to feel and act natural, provide a cure for psychiatric disorders and that will enable completely new user-computer interfaces.
2. Peh Ruey Feng, Program Director of Singapore-Stanford Biodesign (SSB), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR); Ruey Feng is the Principal Investigator of Advent Access which aims to significantly reduce the overall cost of hemodialysis at end-stage kidney failure, to preserve vascular health and to save patients from the morbidity of needing multiple surgeries to sustain their lives.
3. Zhou Lihan, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, MiRXES Pte. Ltd. Lihan and three colleagues founded MIRXES with the vision of creating accurate, affordable and non-invasive cancer detection tests. He has developed an assay platform that is 100 times more sensitive than existing technologies to identify specific patterns of blood borne microRNA that correlate with cancer at its early and asymptomatic stage.
4. Yeung Ying Yeung, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore; Ying Yeung has developed a novel asymmetric halogenation reaction for the preparation of drugs molecules, which will help in making only one hand of a mirror-image pair of molecules that can be life-saving; especially in situations where the presence of the opposite hand’s molecules can be fatal.
5. Panu Sukitpaneenit, Membrane Scientist, Koch Membrane Systems, Inc. Membrane-based separation technology provides the most direct, effective and environmentally-conscious approach for clean energy and water sustainability. Panu's research centres on designing novel and high separation membrane materials and technologies to harvest clean energy and water in specific areas of renewable biofuel energy (from waste or non-food biomass), clean water production via forward osmosis desalination process, and membrane-based osmotic power generation.
6. Chua Pei Wen Vivien, Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Co-Program Director, NUS-TUDelft Double M.Sc. Degree Program, National University of Singapore; Vivien is developing a state-of-the-art coupled ocean-hydrologic modeling tool for investigating the impacts of climate change and anthropogenic influences in coastal zones.
7. Li Guangda, Co-Founder & CTO, Visenze; Visenze provides a sophisticated visual search and recognition platform serving hundreds of millions of queries each day; Guangda has extensively researched how to unlock intelligence captured in rich visual content by using sophisticated visual recognition technology, and its application to recommend products through to mobile ecommerce.
8. Benjamin Tee, Stanford Biodesign Global Innovation Fellow (Singapore-Stanford), Stanford University / Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR); Benjamin has developed flexible and stretchable electronic skin-like sensors that capture some of the high mechanical sensitivity and self-healing capabilities of human skin; his work is highly cited by the media and at EmTech Singapore he will present where he believes these technologies can play a role in the coming decades.
9. Shawn Tan, Research Scientist, Deputy Head, Patterning & Fabrication , Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR); Shawn brings a background in bio-engineering to nanoplasmonics, and his research is promoting the understanding and manipulation of how light behaves at the nanometer-scale. His research has advanced super-resolution plasmonic colour printing and he recently demonstrated the world’s smallest reproduction of a painting in full-colour, which represents a leap in resolution beyond the state-of-the-art.
10. Dario Poletti, , Engineering Product Development Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design & SUTD-MIT International Design Centre; Dario addresses energy related issues at the nano scale, searching for fundamental and general design principles for the next generation of energy efficient nano devices. His research in theoretical quantum mechanics focuses on many-body quantum dynamics and quantum open systems for applications to quantum simulation and nano-energetics.

All 10 regional honourees are now eligible for selection on the global list, for which 35 Innovators Under 35 years of age as of 1 October 2015 will be selected. The Global TR35 list will be celebrated at the EmTech 2015 event held in Boston, Massachusetts. The global list will be showcased in the September/October 2015 issue of the magazine, and online at www.technologyreview.com/tr35.

Learn more about the Asia Pacific honourees at the emtechsingapore.com website.