Research activities at NTU
Research and development form an important part of the activities of the University. The University encourages its staff to do R&D work as well as provide consultancy services to industries and businesses in their areas of expertise.
To facilitate multi-disciplinary research and advanced training, research institutes and several research centres have been set up. With its focus on pioneering innovative and reliable home-grown technologies, NTU has seen over 30 companies started up to commercialise technologies developed at NTU in various fields ranging from biomedical devices to e-commerce, IT electronics and manufacturing processes.
The University has also moved decisively to seek a significant share of the substantial new funding available from the National Research Foundation. Our faculty has submitted a wide range of research proposals in response to the Competitive Research Programme (CRP) scheme under the Foundation, reflecting the span of research strengths and interests across the University. Launched in April 2006, the CRP Funding Scheme aims to support programmes, each comprising multiple related projects under a unifying theme, through a bottom-up approach. The aim of the CRP Funding Scheme is to complement the existing Strategic Research Programmes that have been identified top-down and to identify potential strategic research areas in which Singapore can invest to develop new industries for the future. To date, the University has received two CRP awards in the area of "Artificial Mesoscopic Structures for Next Generation Electronic and Photonic Technology" and "Combined-Cycle Solar Energy Self-Sustaining Membrane Distillation and Membrane Distillation Bioreactor Water Production and Recycling System".
In addition, the University's proposal for a Research Centre of Excellence in Earth Observatory of Singapore was also approved by the Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council as one of several RCEs to be set up with co-funding from the National Research Foundation and the Ministry of Education. The Earth Observatory of Singapore will focus its research on hazardous natural processes that pose threats to the region, including tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and climate change.
To sustain the enhanced research intensity, the University has been developing initiatives to rapidly expand the faculty talent pool. The Nanyang Assistant Professorship scheme is the latest initiative, under which top researchers and scholars will be recruited from around the world to play leading roles in the University's new wave of multidisciplinary and integrative research.