SMU-FDU GLOBAL FORUM

Prof Alan K.L. Chan is Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Chair Professor of Inter-Religious Studies and Harmony and Provost at Singapore Management University (SMU).  Prior to joining SMU, Prof Chan was Provost and J.S. Lee Professor of Chinese Culture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  From 2009 to 2020, he served as Toh Puan Mahani Idris Daim Chair Professor of Humanities, Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and from 2018, Vice-President at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore.

Prof Chan obtained his PhD degree in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto and began his academic career at the University of Manitoba, Canada.  He then joined the Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore (NUS), where he held several leadership roles, including the Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and Associate Provost (Undergraduate Education).  While at NUS, Prof Chan twice received the Teaching Excellence Award.

Prof Zhou received his PhD in 1997 from Fudan University (FDU) and conducted postdoctoral research at Institute for Material Research of Tohoku University (1997–2000) and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2000–2004). He joined FDU in 2004, served as Vice Chair (2009-2020) and Chair of the Physics Department (2020–2024), and became Vice President of FDU in 2024. He is a Fellow of Optica, American Physical Society, and Chinese Optical Society. His research focuses on metamaterials and nanophononics. Prof Zhou serves as co-founding editor of Photonics Insights and Optics and Photonics Research. His honors include the NSFC “Outstanding Young Scientist” (2007), the “Chang Jiang Scholars Program” Chair Professorship (2009), the First Prize of the Natural Science Award of Shanghai (2016), the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award of China (2019), and the Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher Awards (2019-2024).

Prof Zhu is currently a tenured GSR Chair Professor and Associate Dean at the School of Computing and Information Systems, SMU. His research interests include AI and collaborative intelligence, Web3 and blockchain, data asset and AI governance, with emphasis on their application to business, financial and consumer innovation.

Prof ZHU is currently the Director of SMU-Fudan DBA(Tech) Program. He is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Blockchain Association of Singapore and the President of Fudan University Alumni Association Singapore. He also serves as the Adjunct Senior Principal Scientist of A*Star leading the Deep-Tech Pillar for the Centre for Advanced Technologies in Online Safety (CATOS). He was the founding director of both the Pinnacle Lab for Analytics with China Ping An Insurance Group and the DBS-SMU Life Analytics Lab. Prof ZHU has over 100 peer-reviewed research publications at top international venues with multiple Best Paper Awards. He won the Early Career Award of PAKDD’19 and is the PC Co-Chair of DASFAA’25, the General Co-Chair of IEEE ICDM’18, ACM KDD’21 and IEEE ICDE’28. Prof ZHU obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2009. 

Prof Zhang is also the Director of the China Center for Economic Studies at FDU. He is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts at Fudan and a leading Chinese economist specializing in the Chinese economy, economic development, and institutional transition. 

He received his PhD in Economics from FDU in 1992 and subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Sussex and Washington State University. He has held visiting research positions at leading institutions including the London School of Economics and Political Science, SOAS University of London, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University, and Yale University.

He has published extensively on China’s economic reform, transition, and development, with around 200 academic articles and numerous books in both Chinese and English. His research has received multiple national and international awards, including the Bergson Prize from the Association for Comparative Economic Studies. He also serves on a number of national and international academic and advisory bodies, including the International Advisory Panel of the New Development Bank. 

Founder and CEO of Mary Ag/墨泉生物, an AI-driven vertical farming company working to make food sovereignty economically viable anywhere in the world. Born in Shanghai, Frank came of age in Toronto and bridges North American product thinking and China's engineering and manufacturing depth. His global team designs and develops its growing systems and software platform in-house. Its highest site, at 3,700 metres, is China's first profitable high-altitude vertical farm.

Dr Cheong is Vice Provost for Strategic Research Partnerships in SMU, and concurrently Senior Adviser for Health Economics at MOH, and Chair of the Board Oversight Committee of Advanced Cell Therapy and Research Institute of Singapore (ACTRIS). 

Previously, as Deputy Secretary (Technology) at MOH, he deployed technology against COVID-19, and developed the health research and innovation ecosystem to achieve Healthier SG – i.e. population health, precision health and preventive health. He also sat on the Board of Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS), which has since been renamed as Synapxe. Prior to MOH, he was Deputy CEO of National Research Foundation, where he oversaw the implementation of the S$19 billion Research Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) 2020 plan and led an inter-agency effort to develop the S$25 billion RIE 2025 plan. Dr. Cheong's extensive career also includes strategic roles in education (MOE), economic planning (MTI, EDB), and fiscal strategy (MOF) across various government agencies. 

As a Rhodes Scholar and PSC Scholar, he obtained his DPhil/Mphil in Economics from Oxford, and his S.B. in Chemical Engineering and S.B. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  

Prof Jin is also the Deputy Director of the Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Video Technology and Systems Engineering and served as a member of the Overall Expert Group for the National Key R&D Program on Culture Technology and Modern Service Industry under China's 14th Five-Year Plan. He is also a recipient of the Shanghai Outstanding Technology Leader Award. Over the past two decades, his research has focused on key artificial intelligence technologies in areas including 3D data completion, human pose analysis, and content generation. 

Prof Peng holds a PhD in Demography from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and is a Senior Professor of Liberal Arts at FDU. He serves as Dean of the Fudan Institute on Ageing, Director of the Fudan Center for Population and Development Policy Studies, and Executive Vice-President of the Fudan Development Institute. He has held leadership roles in major Chinese population and social science associations and served on committees of several international academic organisations. His work focuses on China’s population dynamics and policies, population ageing, and social development. 

Subramanian is a Professor of Robot Learning and Autonomy in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where he is Director of the Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy, UKRI Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellow and Director of the Generative AI Laboratory. 

His research focusses on robotics and machine learning, with emphasis on achieving safe and robust autonomy in human-centred environments. 

Beyond his academic roles, he has been involved in Five AI, a technology company developing autonomous vehicles technology, as Vice President (2017 – 2020) and Scientific Advisor (2021-23). Five AI was acquired by Bosch GmbH in 2022.  

Ren Yan is an AI transformation leader at MetLife Asia, focused on translating technology into measurable business and customer value. Her work spans retirement and wealth propositions, personalized customer engagement, and enterprise AI upskilling. She is also MetLife’s enterprise sustainability champion. 

A Fellow of the Society of Actuaries (FSA) and MBA graduate of London Business School, Yan brings a unique combination of technical rigor and business leadership, with international experience across Hong Kong, London, New York, Dubai, and Singapore. 

She is also the founder of Bridge Lab, a Singapore-based nonprofit dedicated to democratizing AI knowledge and helping communities translate leading global AI innovations into practical impact. Currently enrolled in the SMU-Fudan DBA Tech programme, her interests focus on trusted AI and human-computer interaction (HCI) ecosystems. 

Lawrence is currently Director of the Business and Ecosystems division at IMDA. The Business and Ecosystems division is responsible for orchestrating engagements and strategic collaborations across government, industry and academia stakeholders towards the early adoption of AI and emerging technologies. 

He started his career in public sector research and development when he founded the Healthcare and Biomedical Analytics Laboratory at the Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), which focused on building deep capabilities in machine learning for biomedicine and healthcare. After the stint at I2R, he moved on to Zuellig Pharma where he took on the role of Chief Data Scientist and led the development of institutional AI capabilities across the APAC region. Following that, he joined the Allianz Asia-Pacific regional business unit, where he was responsible for building the APAC healthcare AI capabilities across life and health insurance business units. Thereafter, he returned to public service at the Ministry of Health where he had the opportunity to drive strategy and capability development in AI and emerging technologies for the public healthcare sector. 

Lawrence was previously a co-founder of an AI startup in enterprise security solutions (acquired). He was an Associate Faculty at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, previously served as President of the Association for Medical and Bio-informatics Singapore (AMBIS), and vice-chair of the Chinese-American Pharmaceutical Society (CABS) Singapore chapter. He received his PhD in Computational Biology from the National University of Singapore. 

Prof Liu is also the Fudan Academic Director of the SMU–Fudan DBA Programme. He received his PhD in Economics from Yale University. His research examines how technology and public policy reshape firms, institutions, and economic development, with a particular focus on taxation, government capacity, industrial organization, innovation, and resource allocation. His work has appeared in leading economics journals, including the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of International Economics, and the Journal of Development Economics. He also serves as an Associate Editor of International Tax and Public Finance.