Good afternoon:
Guest-of-Honour, Madam Rahayu Mahzam, Minister of State, Ministry of Digital Development and Information and the Ministry of Health
Our keynote speaker, Professor Robert Califf, Duke School of Medicine
Professor Aaron Thean, Provost, National University of Singapore
Professor Mary Klotman, Executive Vice President for Health Affairs at Duke, Dean of the Duke School of Medicine
Professor Ng Wai Hoe, Group CEO of SingHealth
Mr Goh Yew Lin, Duke-NUS Governing Board Chair
Mr Tony Chew, Founding Chair of the Duke-NUS Governing Board
Members of the Duke-NUS Governing Board
Distinguished guests, faculty, family and friends, and most importantly, the Class of 2026,
It is my great privilege to welcome all of you to the graduation and hooding ceremony of the Duke-NUS Medical School Class of 2026.
This is a special occasion for many reasons.
For our graduates, it marks the end of one demanding chapter.
From your first lesson in the LEAD room to practical sessions in the procedural lab and rounds in the wards, you’ve spent years mastering not just clinical skills and knowledge but also learning how to care and advocate for your patients.
Many of you have also spent countless hours in the research lab—planning experiments, analysing data and troubleshooting that odd experiment before finally seeing that fateful band on your blot, or getting that critical set of results.
This takes grit, resilience and courage. And you’ve done well, so give yourself a pat on the back.
The road ahead may not be easy and you may face challenges that ask even more of you, but I am confident that your time at Duke-NUS has prepared you well for your next chapter.
For your families and loved ones, it is a day of pride, relief and, I suspect, a little disbelief that the long nights, anxious messages and food deliveries have finally brought us here.
And through it all, you’ve remained a pillar of support and strength for our graduates so this momentous milestone belongs to you too.
And for me, it is especially meaningful because this is my first graduation ceremony as Dean of Duke-NUS. It is my immense honour and privilege to celebrate all of you, and to thank you for placing your trust in the School.
Today, we recognise 135 graduates, our largest cohort to date: 78 from the MD and MD-PhD class, 38 from our PhD programmes, and 19 from the Master in Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality.
Each of you came to Duke-NUS by a different route. Some from science and engineering, some from healthcare, the humanities, business, teaching, accounting and other fields. But you leave today with something in common: not only a degree, but a culture and way of thinking.
That is what Duke-NUS was created to do.
When the School was established, the aim was not simply to add another medical school to Singapore. It was to create something different by design: a graduate-entry medical school that brings together the strengths of Duke and NUS, and is deeply embedded in Singapore’s healthcare system through SingHealth.
So it is fitting that we celebrate today here at Academia, in the heart of our Academic Medicine partnership. This building is more than a venue. It reminds us that education, research, clinical care and innovation are not separate worlds. They meet here, challenge one another here, and when they work well together, improve lives far beyond this auditorium.
Let me also acknowledge those who made this day possible.
To the families and loved ones of our graduates, thank you. As I mentioned earlier, you have encouraged, waited, worried and celebrated. Your support has mattered deeply, and today belongs to you too.
To our faculty, staff, mentors and clinical educators, thank you for teaching, guiding and shaping this class.
We are honoured to have with us Mdm Rahayu Mahzam. Mdm Rahayu’s work at MOH, including in community care, active ageing, child and maternal health, healthcare financing and healthy living, speaks directly to the future our graduates are entering. Singapore’s healthcare priorities are shifting towards prevention, population health, ageing well in the community, and trusted, inclusive use of technology. These are not abstract policy themes. They are the real-world conditions in which many of you will practise, research, lead and serve.
We are also honoured to welcome Professor Robert Califf as our keynote speaker. Rob has been connected with Duke-NUS from the beginning, and his career across cardiology, clinical trials, regulation and public service shows how evidence can move from inquiry to impact.
I also want to warmly acknowledge Professor Soo Khee Chee, who will lead the Class in reciting the Hippocratic Oath, and who played an important role in the early development of academic medicine in Singapore.
It says a lot about the amount of respect that Khee Chee garners when the Class has nominated him for this role.
And I want to pay special tribute to Professor Thomas Coffman. Under Tom’s thoughtful and steady leadership over the past decade, Duke-NUS strengthened its education, research and academic medicine mission, and graduated 10 classes of students. Thank you, Tom, for your calm and principled leadership.
That list of people and institutions tells us something important about Duke-NUS.
No one gets here alone. Not a student. Not a faculty member. Not a school. Not a healthcare system.
Duke-NUS was built on connection: across institutions, disciplines, countries, and across the classroom, laboratory, clinic and community. That connectedness is how a student’s question can become a research project, how a research finding can become a clinical trial, how a clinical problem can become an innovation challenge, and how national priorities can shape what and how we teach.
To the Class of 2026, this is the culture you inherit.
A culture that asks:
Why are things the way they are?
What evidence do we need?
Who is not being served well enough?
And how can we do better?
This is not a mindset just reserved for future and current clinician-scientists in this room.
It matters to every doctor who listens carefully when a patient’s story does not fit the usual pattern. It matters to every researcher pursuing a difficult question. It matters to every patient safety and healthcare quality leader who refuses to accept preventable harm as inevitable.
And it matters to every graduate entering a world that is changing faster than any curriculum can fully anticipate.
If I may offer one lesson from my own journey, it is this: stay curious, ask the right questions, and be the change that you want to see.
Curiosity on its own is not enough. It must lead us to better evidence, better judgement and better care. In healthcare, the most important questions are rarely only scientific or clinical. They are also human and systemic. What does this person need? What is the family carrying? What is the system missing? What can we improve?
That spirit is visible in this class.
We see it in Project DOVE Nepal, started by Sheriff Quek and Charles Yau with Peace Child Ministry, where students sought to understand the high incidence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease among women in Nepal’s Dang district.
We see it in Chan Kai Lin, who founded the Women in Medicine student interest group to build a supportive community around mentorship and career development. We see it in our PhD graduates, including Kunal Mishra, whose work combines computational and wet-lab approaches to study immune cells in chronic kidney disease.
And we see it in our Master in Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality graduates, whose work reminds us that better care is also about safer systems, clearer communication and the courage to improve what can be improved.
Together, you represent the full breadth of Duke-NUS: doctors, researchers, clinician-scientists, healthcare quality leaders, educators, innovators and system thinkers.
You will not all take the same path. You should not. But I hope you carry the same core instinct: to keep asking what better could look like.
So as you leave Duke-NUS, remember this.
Be excellent, but stay humble. Be evidence-based, but stay human. Be ambitious, but stay grounded in purpose. And when you see something that can be better, do not walk past it.
Ask the question. Start the work. Bring others with you.
On behalf of Duke-NUS Medical School, congratulations to the Class of 2026.
We are proud of you, we believe in you, and we look forward to seeing the many ways in which you will improve lives in Singapore and beyond.
Thank you.