Bio
Dr Alvin Chua is currently Assistant Director, Transplant Research at the Singapore General Hospital’s (SGH) Division of Musculoskeletal Sciences, and Principal Investigator of the SGH Plastic, Reconstructive & Aesthetic Surgery Research Laboratory. In addition, he is Assistant Director of Transplant Tissue Centre, SingHealth Duke-NUS Transplant Centre, responsible for the operations, quality assurance and research of the comprehensive tissue banking services which comprises of skin, cardiovascular tissues and iliac vessels. For academic involvements, he is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor with Duke-NUS Medical School under the Musculoskeletal Sciences Academic Clinical Programme, spoke for SingHealth Residency Teaching in Transplant Series and taught Biomaterials/Tissue Engineering at Nanyang Polytechnic, School of Engineering as an Adjunct Lecturer. In the industry setting, Dr Chua serves as an external Consultant to CellResearch Corporation Pte Ltd, a Singapore biotechology company specializing in umbilical cord lining tissues and stem cells for therapy.
Dr Chua has more than 18 years of tissue banking and cellular skin culture experience for clinical applications. He was previously trained at the Shriners Hospital for Children’s skin tissue bank, Galveston, Texas, USA and Queensland Heart Valve Bank, Brisbane, Australia. He is a certified tissue bank specialist (CTBS), a certification programme offered by the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB). At the national level, Dr Chua sits in several working and review committees set up by the Ministry of Health, Singapore to look into regulations of human biomedical research, tissue banking, cellular/gene therapy and donor/recipient screening for organ/tissue transplantation. For skin culture and research, Dr Chua was trained at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, in Switzerland. In 2012, he was awarded the Outstanding Scientific Abstract prize at the Annual Meeting of the AATB in Colorado as well as the Young Scientist Award (sponsored by the British High Commission) at the UK-Singapore Translational Skin Biology Symposium. In 2016, he received the Distinguished Team Award as part of the SGH Burns Team at the SingHealth Excellence Awards ceremony which recognises recipients’ dedication and exemplary contributions to healthcare leadership within SingHealth. More recently, Dr Chua was conferred the National Day Award 2018 - Commendation Medal- for his contribution to tissue banking, received the Best Mentor Transplant Allied Health Professional Award 2019 from Singhealth Duke-NUS Transplant Centre; and received the second prize of the SingHealth Duke-NUS Research Team Award 2019 with Professor Karl Tryggvason’s group from Duke-NUS for using specialized laminin proteins to culture skin keratinocytes in a much safer system to treat burn injuries.
Education
Doctor of Philosophy
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Master in Engineering
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) Hons Class 2A
National University of Singapore, Singapore