The Rainmaker | Asian Scientist Magazine

Professor Lam Khin Yong has managed to combine two careers: one as a hands-on scientist andanother as one of Singapores preeminent research rainmakers.

Grace Chua | December 30, 2015 | Editorials

AsianScientist (Dec. 30, 2015) - How does an underwater mine shockwave travel through the seatowards its target? What happens to a pager when it is dropped from a certain height? And if a firebreaks out in an enclosed space, how does the smoke fill the room?

Lam Khin Yong, 58, chief of staff and vice-president for research at Nanyang TechnologicalUniversity (NTU), has explored or managed all these research questions and more in a three-decadecareer.

A professor of mechanical engineering, his expertise and consultancy work for companies has alsohelped secure more than S$200m of research grants and collaborations for the Singapore researchcommunity, including a S$75m lab with aerospace giant Rolls-Royce.

In other words, Professor Lam has managed to combine two successful careers: one as a hands-on

scientist and another as one of Singapores preeminent research rainmakers.

Hungry from day one

As a young graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Lam developedhydraulic fracturing methodsthe same technology widely used in the oil and gas industry, especiallyfor shale gas extraction today.

His research focussed on modelling a fluid as it travels through a narrow channel and interacts withits surroundings. He worked on a complete simulation of hydraulic fracturing in three dimensions,first understanding the basic physics behind fluid movement, then building mathematical models toexplain how fracking would work under various field conditions.

With his advisor, Professor Lam developed software based on this work. It was later used by industryto simulate underground oil extraction.

Most importantly, he learned to be entrepreneurial.

I think my MIT training gave me an added advantage, he says. My professor was always on thelookout for funding and I learned to be hungry from day one.

When he graduated, oil and gas companies tried to recruit the newly-minted PhD, but he decided toreturn home in 1985 to be nearer to his family.

He joined the National University of Singapore (NUS), which at the time was just beginning to growinto a major research university.

But research funding was hard to come by at the private investigator time.

There was no NSTB [National Science and Technology Board], no A*STAR [Agency for Science,Technology and Research], only the Science Council of Singapore, he says. It was one or two yearsbefore I got my first PhD student.

A lucky break

In 1991, while working as the principal investigator on a project to model the effectiveness of civil-defence shelter doors, Professor Lam dreamt up his first big research project for Singapore.

Having served his reservist duty in the Singapore Navy, he was already familiar with its design andtesting procedures for new vessels and equipment. Recognising the need for vessels to betterwithstand shock, Professor Lam and his team carried out computational modelling to simulate fieldconditions.

In 1993, his project proposal received a S$3.13m (S$4.6m in todays dollars) grantone of the biggestat the timefrom the Naval Logistics Department and DSO National Laboratories. Thus was born theunderwater shock laboratory at NUS.

Professor Lam, with support from his colleagues andstudents, used a mini supercomputer bought withthe grant money to model shock waves and theresulting bubbles travelling through water, such asfrom underwater mine explosions, analysing theirinteraction with the surroundings. The researchhelped the Navy design naval vessels that couldbetter withstand underwater shock.

Five years later, his team became the first led by auniversity academic to win the Ministry of DefencesDefence Technology Prize for its work.

Beyond explosion simulations

One advantage of Professor Lams specialty, computational modelling, is that it is endlessly versatile.

If you have the skills and the basic understanding of physics, you can apply these to any otherdomain, he says. Before computational modelling, you had to do experiments; these could tell youwhether a design would pass or fail in the engineering sense, but computational modelling helps youunderstand its behaviour in various conditions.

With the Navy as its first major client, word soon spread of Professor Lams underwater shocklaboratory. This spawned several more industrial collaborations with firms such as Motorola and STKinetics.

For instance, in a project for Motorola, Professor Lams modelling was used to answer the question:how will a pager casing behave when it is dropped from a certain height? (In the process he surelysaved the lives of many crash-test pagers.)

One memorable project, Professor Lam recalls, was modelling the ventilation system for theEsplanades theatres. His research questions included: how will cool air flow through the space tomake the temperature even for all audience members? If there is a fire, where will the smoke go?

In all, between 1995 and 2007, Professor Lam helped secure more than S$30m of external,competitive research grants for computational mechanics work, from companies and organisations.

Over the years, advances in computing power have sped up modelling and simulation tasks.Supercomputers that once performed one million operations a second can now perform a billiontimes that, Professor Lam explains.

Problems that seemed insurmountable years ago have become routine tasks, he says. And we nowhave the capacity to solve challenges in a virtual environment on a scale never dreamt of before.

By 1998, the NUS centre for computational mechanics had merged with the national centre forsupercomputing research and services to form the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC),under the auspices of the NSTB and later A*STAR. As private investigator the NUS centres foundingdirector, Professor Lam also became founding director of IHPC, which studies the properties ofmaterials and fluid movement. Its visualisation group is the first in Asia to have a three-dimensional

immersive visualisation cave.

The most interesting and fun years I had were when I was running IHPC, he says.

You are like a super-PI [principal investigator, the lead researcher in a group], running research inyour fields of interest and managing a large team. You, your colleagues and PhD students do basicresearch, but the results get adopted by companies and agencies.

Despite his intimate knowledge of academia-industry collaborations, Professor Lam never reallyconsidered joining the private sector.

It was always clear that my primary interests lay in academia, he says. I also enjoy forming researchpartnerships and naturally gravitated towards bringing like-minded researchers and industrycounterparts in collaboration. Therefore, IHPC was a natural progression while I was in NUS.

Following IHPC was a string of more administrative appointments, such as head of A*STARsgraduate academy, to nurture students for science and engineering fields; chair of NTUs school ofmechanical and aerospace engineering; associate provost for graduate education and specialprojects; and chief executive officer of NTU Innovation. In these capacities, Professor Lam helpedmanage ever-bigger budgets and tasks.

Linking industry and academia

As NTUs chief of staff and vice-president for research today, he helps to manage research in anarray of fields. In 2013, for example, he helped the university secure a major collaboration withRolls-Royce, a renowned British engine and power-systems firm.

But the S$75m lab, which studies electrical power and control systems, manufacturing and repairtechnologies, and computational engineering, is actually the product of a long courtship.

In 1999, the IHPC signed a research agreement with Rolls-Royce and Imperial College London. Wehad a supercomputer in Singapore, but the data had to be couriered to Imperial in those daysbecause the network link was not strong, Professor Lam recalls.

Meanwhile, NTU and Rolls-Royce had been collaborating on an ad-hoc basis since 2005, but a long-term working relationship had yet to crystallise.

Essentially, we needed to find a common platform and agree on thematic research areas thatintegrated the universitys mandate of basic research and innovation with Rolls-Royces emphasis onfast-tracking applications for commercialisation, Professor Lam says.

So when the National Research Foundation announced its Corporate Laboratory scheme in 2013, inwhich major firms would co-fund dedicated research labs at local universities, NTU and Rolls-Roycewere perfectly placed to work together. The Rolls-Royce@NTU Corporate Lab, jointly funded by theNational Research Foundation, Rolls-Royce and NTU, was born.

I believe it is our long partnership of trust and mutual understanding which allowed us to resolveany differences, and come to mutual agreement with relative ease, he adds.

In April 2015, NTU and ST Engineering, a local engineering giant, announced a S$53m corporatelaboratory in robotics and autonomous systems.

It took me and my colleagues more than a year to get the lab proposal approved, Professor Lamsays.

Today, Professor Lam continues to help guide NTUs research directions and hopes to be active formany years yet.

At a larger level, Professor Lam believes Singapore should strengthen its collaborations betweenuniversities, research institutes, national agencies and industry in a triple helix partnership, tocreate real research impact and innovation.

It should also continue efforts to get students excited about a science or engineering career.

I hope these efforts will translate not only into creating a future generation of exemplary STEM[science, technology, engineering, mathematics] leaders and researchers at home but also create ageneration of Singaporeans who are curious and appreciate the spirit of scientific inquiry andinnovation, he says.

This feature is part of a series of 25 profiles, first published as Singapore's Scientific Pioneers. Clickhere to read the rest of the articles in this series.

Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Cyril Ng.

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