World-leading scientists leave US after decades for Singapore universities

Battery scientist Shirley Meng and energy scientist Yang Shao-Horn have announced their move to Nanyang Technological University (NTU), while biomedical imaging pioneer Changhuei Yang and AI materials scientist Shyue Ping Ong joined the National University of Singapore (NUS).

NUS and NTU rank 10th and 12th globally in the QS World University Rankings 2027, placing them first and third in Asia.

Singapore has stepped up investment in scientific research and efforts to attract research talent in recent years. Under its RIE2030 plan, the government has committed S$37 billion (US$29 billion) to research, innovation and enterprise over five years from April 2026, maintaining spending at about 1% of GDP annually.

On Oct. 5, Singapore announced S$118 million for its largest bioeconomy funding initiative, bringing planned investment in the field to about S$200 million over five years, The Straits Times reported. The initiative includes nearly S$50 million for a new National Centre for Engineering Biology at NUS, which plans to recruit about 50 researchers and staff.

Singapore has also established programs specifically aimed at attracting scientific talent. Its Returning Singaporean Scientists Scheme (RSSS) brings established Singaporean researchers based overseas back to leadership positions at local universities and publicly funded research institutes.

VnExpress International profiles four internationally recognized scientists whose moves stand out for their research impact and new roles in Singapore.

Shirley Meng

Battery scientist Shirley Meng. Photo courtesy of NTU

Meng joined NTU on July 1 as vice president for industry and a Distinguished University Professor, the university's highest faculty rank. She previously held the Liew Family Professorship in Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.

Meng is a prominent energy storage researcher who develops materials and technologies for next-generation batteries, including alternatives to lithium that could make energy storage cheaper and more sustainable.

Her research group reported what it described as the world's first anode-free sodium solid-state battery in 2024. Sodium is more abundant than lithium, making the technology a potential route to lower-cost batteries for electric vehicles and power grids. She has been named among the world's most cited researchers by Clarivate and received the Faraday Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Meng earned her bachelor's degree from NTU in 2000 and became a Singapore citizen in 2004 before building much of her academic career in the U.S.

"I've always been an internationalist," she told Science. "Singapore is a place where people can collaborate, regardless of what country you come from."

She said that the Trump administration's retreat from clean-energy policies and tighter immigration rules had also weighed on her decision to move.

She will keep a partial appointment at UChicago for a transitional period and will continue to lead the Energy Transition Network she founded there, the university said. She remains an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego, where her husband, Graham Elliott, is the Sir Clive Granger Professor of Econometrics.

Changhuei Yang

Singaporean biomedical imaging scientist Changhuei Yang. Photo courtesy of NUS

Yang joined the NUS in August under the RSSS after 21 years on the Caltech faculty, where he held the Thomas G. Myers Professorship of Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering and Medical Engineering and served as head of electrical engineering.

A pioneer in biomedical optics and computational imaging, he develops technologies combining light, advanced optical systems and computing to reveal biological structures that are difficult to capture with conventional imaging.

Among his most influential contributions is Fourier ptychographic microscopy, a computational imaging technique first demonstrated by his research group in 2013. It combines multiple lower-resolution images taken under different lighting angles to produce a highly detailed image across a wider field of view, overcoming a common trade-off in conventional microscopy between viewing area and fine detail.

More recently, Yang has applied AI to medical imaging. In a 2024 pilot study with researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, his team trained AI to analyze lung cancer biopsy images and predict whether the disease would spread to the brain.

The AI correctly identified whether patients had experienced brain metastasis 87% of the time, compared with 57% for four expert pathologists examining the same images. The researchers cautioned that the study was preliminary and larger trials would be needed to validate the findings.

Yang was ranked among the world's top 1% of scientists in the 2025 Stanford/Elsevier citation database. He was also elected a Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors in 2020.

His work has generated more than 90 patents, 52 of which have been licensed to startups and companies including Amgen, Bio-Rad Laboratories and Leica Microsystems.

At NUS, Yang is establishing the Computational Microscopy, AI and Wavefront Shaping Lab, where he plans to develop imaging systems designed for artificial intelligence rather than human vision. The goal is to determine what AI can detect in medical images that humans cannot, then design microscopes that capture those features more effectively.

Shyue Ping Ong

Singaporean materials scientist Shyue Ping Ong. Photo courtesy of NUS

Ong joined NUS under the RSSS in January after nearly two decades in the U.S., including 12 years at UC San Diego, where he became a full professor and led the Materials Virtual Lab.

His research combines artificial intelligence, scientific data and materials science to speed up the search for materials with useful properties. He is known for developing computational tools that allow researchers to predict how materials will behave before spending time and resources making them in a laboratory.

Ong is a founding developer of pymatgen, an open-source materials analysis software library widely used by researchers, and has played a major role in the Materials Project, a U.S.-based initiative that provides computational information on materials.

At NUS, he is establishing an "AI Foundry" that connects AI models with scientific databases and automated experiments. The system is intended to shorten materials-discovery cycles that can take months or years by allowing AI to propose materials, automated systems to test them and the resulting data to improve the models.

Ong described his path into science as unexpected, writing in a LinkedIn post shortly before his return that he was "never meant to be a scientist." After studying electrical and information science at the University of Cambridge, he worked in Singapore's public service before leaving at 29 to pursue a doctorate in materials science at MIT.

Ong said Singapore's push into AI for science helped persuade him to return. "Singapore is making bold investments in AI for science, and it feels like the right moment for my next stage of growth."

His long-term ambition is to help establish Singapore as a global center for materials discovery. "My hope is that in 10 years, when people ask where the world's best materials are designed, Singapore is part of the answer."

Yang Shao-Horn

Energy scientist Yang Shao-Horn. Photo courtesy of MIT

The latest high-profile recruitment was announced Sept. 17, when NTU said Shao-Horn would leave Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become its vice president for research and a Distinguished University Professor. She will begin at NTU in January 2027 after more than 24 years on the MIT faculty.

Her research focuses on energy storage and conversion, including batteries, sustainable fuels and chemicals. More recently, her group has combined automated experiments with machine learning and AI to accelerate the search for new materials.

Shao-Horn has published more than 470 papers and has been named a Highly Cited Researcher in chemistry and materials science. She is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

She has mentored about 150 students and postdoctoral researchers, around 50 of whom have gone on to academic positions worldwide, and has co-founded startups to turn research discoveries into technologies.

At NTU, she will oversee the university's research agenda and help determine its strategic research priorities.

She already has longstanding ties with the university through collaborations including the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, while several former members of her research group have joined NTU and NUS as faculty members.