Opening remarks | Professor Patrick Tan, Dean, Duke-NUS Medical School
Monday, 30 March 2026 | 9.00AM
Duke-NUS Amphitheatre
Salutations
- Distinguished guests, colleagues and friends,
Good morning, everybody.
It’s my pleasure to welcome you to the inaugural “Bridging Minds” that Duke-NUS is proud to organise with our partners from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.
To our guests and speakers gathered here today, some of whom have flown halfway around the world to be with us, thank you for your support.
Today, we are joined by some of the most exceptional minds in neuroscience research and education—from researchers to healthcare professionals—who have dedicated their research to studying the brain and bridging our gaps in understanding the mechanisms driving certain conditions and disease.
To give you a sense of that breadth, we have invited local experts from institutions including NUS, NTU and SingHealth, alongside global voices from Duke, Tsinghua, Harvard and Nature among many others, to share the latest updates from their respective fields.
Director-General of Health, Professor Kenneth Mak, will also join us as our special guest for a panel discussion tomorrow.
Through bringing this diversity of experts together, we want to create a space where disciplines intersect, where collaborations are strengthened and new connections are bridged beyond Duke-NUS.
Which brings me to our theme: advances in neurodevelopment and mental health.
Duke-NUS’ focus on neurodevelopment and mental health
At Duke-NUS, we see mental health not as an isolated specialty, but as a core pillar of medicine, and a priority that we seek to address. And our researchers from the Neuroscience and Behavioural Disorders Programme led by Hongyan, have been working on some of these areas. (And you’ll hear more updates from some of them over the course of this meeting).
Understanding how the brain develops and how it shapes mental wellbeing is the cornerstone of our work at NBD.
To put the scale of this research challenge into perspective, more than one billion people around the world live with mental health disorders and closer to home, mental health disorders are one of the top four leading causes of disease burden. The burden of disease continues to rise, particularly among children and young people.
And studying this intricate process of neurodevelopment enables us to understand what happens when this process is disrupted—whether it’s caused by genetic factors, environmental stressors, or social adversity—and how it results in consequences that can reverberate across an individual’s lifespan.
Now, we know that conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia and mood disorders have their roots in early brain development.
This is where research into early identification, early intervention and ultimately prevention can make a difference in improving the lived experience for patients and their families.
Because while we have made progress, major questions remain:
How do molecular and cellular events affect the brain’s circuitry? What other biological processes shape brain development? And critically, how do we translate the insights gleaned into preventive strategies and meaningful therapies?
I hope this symposium serves as a platform to foster scientific exchange and collaboration at Duke-NUS.
Because when experts such as basic scientists, clinician-scientists, and public health experts collaborate, we bridge scientific depth with clinical impact, bringing us a step closer to life-changing interventions.
Conclusion
So I encourage you to challenge assumptions, explore bold ideas and connect with the many experts gathered here today.
To our junior investigators and students in the audience: you are entering this field at an extraordinary time. The tools available to probe the developing brain—ranging from single-cell omics, in vivo imaging, organoids, large-scale cohort data—were unimaginable just a generation ago.
So the work you do today has the potential to change not only scientific paradigms but also shape the lives of patients and families, so let that purpose guide your scientific journey.
And before I conclude, I would also like to give special thanks to the organising committee for putting together what promises to be an intellectually stimulating programme, as well as our sponsors: NNI, NTU, IMCB, Stem Cell Society Singapore, and BCH-Feihe Paediatric Developmental Initiative for your support.
Let us use this symposium to deepen our science, broaden our perspectives, and strengthen the collaborative networks that will drive the next generation of discoveries in neurodevelopment and mental health.
I wish you a productive and inspiring meeting ahead.
Thank you.