Welcome Address
Professor Patrick TanDean, Duke-NUS Medical School
Wednesday, 18 March 2026 | 5.05PM
Duke-NUS Amphitheatre
Salutations
- Professor Kenneth Mak, Director-General of Health
- Judges, mentors and fellows from the Duke-NUS Health Innovator Programme
- Distinguished guests, colleagues and friends,
Good evening, everybody! It is wonderful to see so many members of our innovation community gathered here today.
Let me begin by congratulating the five multidisciplinary teams presenting their work this evening. Remember, reaching “Dazzle Day” is already a significant achievement.
This year’s teams are tackling a diverse set of clinical challenges, ranging from improving patient safety and procedural efficiency to developing tools that can support surgeons and clinicians in delivering better care.
Rather than describing each project in detail, I will leave that to the teams themselves shortly. What I will say is that the ideas you will see tonight all began the same way: with someone noticing a real problem in clinical practice and asking a simple but powerful question: can this be done better?
That spirit of curiosity and problem-solving is exactly what the Duke-NUS Health Innovator Programme, or D-HIP, is designed to cultivate.
In this room tonight, there are clinicians, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, mentors, alumni and students. Each of you brings a different perspective, but you are united by a shared ambition: to improve healthcare by solving real problems.
At Duke-NUS, we believe innovation should not sit at the peripheral of medical education. It should be embedded in how our students learn and think.
Programmes like D-HIP are therefore not simply extracurricular activities. They are part of a broader effort to nurture clinicians and researchers who are comfortable working across disciplines, identifying unmet clinical needs, and translating ideas into solutions that can improve patient care.
This mindset is increasingly important. Healthcare systems today face complex challenges: from ageing populations and chronic disease to rapidly evolving technologies. Addressing these challenges requires clinicians who are not only scientifically rigorous, but also collaborative, entrepreneurial and forward-looking.
Through the combined efforts of our Offices for Education and Innovation & Enterpreneurship, we are building structured pathways that expose students to research, design thinking, translational science and entrepreneurship. D-HIP represents one of the most visible expressions of that effort.
One of the reasons D-HIP is distinctive is the multidisciplinary nature of the teams. This year’s cohort brings together students from Duke-NUS and the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, engineers from the NUS College of Design and Engineering, and MBA candidates from the NUS Business School.
Seventeen individuals with different expertise and lived experiences were intentionally brought together to tackle healthcare problems.
Because innovation in medicine is rarely a solo effort. It is a team sport.
Solutions often emerge when clinical insight meets engineering design, business thinking and scientific curiosity.
Encouragingly, we are already seeing outcomes from previous D-HIP cohorts. Earlier teams have developed solutions aimed at improving colonoscopy procedures, enhancing surgical precision and addressing gaps in patient safety. Some projects have continued beyond the programme, working with clinicians and industry partners to refine prototypes and explore pathways toward real clinical application.
These examples show that the ideas emerging from D-HIP are not just academic exercises. They are part of a growing pipeline of clinician-led innovation.
An important question we often hear is why programmes like D-HIP should begin during medical school, rather than later in a clinician’s career.
The answer is that innovation is not simply a technical skill. It is a mindset.
Through the combined efforts of our Office of Education and our Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Duke-NUS exposes students early to design thinking, translational science and entrepreneurial problem-solving.
When students learn to identify unmet clinical needs, understand how technologies are developed, and work across disciplines, they begin to see healthcare problems differently. They start asking not only how to treat disease, but also how to design better systems and solutions.
Innovation therefore becomes part of how they think as clinicians.
Supporting this effort is the wider innovation ecosystem we are building at Duke-NUS. OIE helps connect students, faculty and researchers with mentors, industry partners and investors, creating the conditions in which ideas can move beyond the laboratory and into real healthcare settings.
None of this would be possible without the community that supports D-HIP.
Our industry mentors and clinical mentors play a crucial role in helping teams sharpen their ideas and translate concepts into practical solutions grounded in real clinical needs.
I would also like to extend our appreciation to our programme sponsors, Terumo Asia Holdings Pte Ltd and Becton Dickinson Medical Products Pte Ltd, whose support helps strengthen the innovation ecosystem around D-HIP and enables our students to translate early ideas into solutions that can ultimately benefit patients. I believe Dr Amit Garg from Terumo and Mr John Ong from Becton Dickinson are with us this evening on livestream. Thank you both, and thank you to your organisations, for your generous and meaningful support.
Alongside partners from industry, It is equally encouraging to see members of the Duke-NUS community, in particular our alumni, returning to mentor the next generation. This year we are fortunate to have alumni, Dr Tan Yubin and Dr Kenneth Goh, contributing their experience, alongside mentors like Dr Kevin Koh who has returned again to support another cohort.
When alumni come back to support programmes like this, it signals something powerful: that Duke-NUS is building not just programmes, but a sustained culture of innovation.
We are also strengthening the pathways that allow promising ideas to move beyond the classroom.
Through our academic medicine partnership with SingHealth, we are working more closely with the innovation team at Singapore General Hospital to create clearer pathways for promising projects to be tested, refined and potentially translated into clinical settings.
Professor Mak, initiatives like D-HIP are also part of how Duke-NUS hopes to contribute to Singapore’s broader healthcare innovation and medtech ecosystem.
By bringing together clinicians, engineers, entrepreneurs and researchers together early in their careers, we are helping cultivate the next generation of clinician-innovators, individuals who will not only care for patients, but also help develop the tools, technologies and solutions that will shape the future of healthcare in Singapore and beyond.
To our five teams presenting today: congratulations once again!
While today is a competition, the most important outcome of this program is the mindset and capability you have developed, the ability to identify meaningful problems, collaborate across disciplines and pursue solutions with persistence and creativity.
Those skills will stay with you long after today’s event.
At Duke-NUS, we believe innovation is ultimately about people – people who are curious, collaborative and committed to improving healthcare.
I look forward to seeing what you have built.
Thank you, and let’s begin.