Tin Wee Tan

My teaching philosophy over the past 20 years has been centered around the introduction of bioinformatics to life science teaching. As early as 1990, I had identified bioinformatics to be a major field in the making, even before the field was known widely as bioinformatics. Twenty years later, this has been proven correct and 21st Century Biology is today, a highly computational and informational science as much as it is experimental and observational. With rapid developments in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), the voluminous data in the life sciences, as part of a global Big Data phenomenon has resulted in every biologist requiring skill sets in computing, computational thinking and IT. In regard to teaching, my focus has had impact both on teaching students in undergraduate/graduate course work and in teaching fellow researchers through ad hoc workshops and courses.In view of the involvement of information technology, I have systematically developed an enduring parallel track in technology development for teaching, in my case bioinformatics, but in the case of others, of wider applicability. In this regard, I have had to transpose myself into the world of Internet technologies just before its explosive growth, and penetrate this field to be a pioneer in Internet technologies and advanced networking. This parallel trajectory has taken me through acquiring skills in pioneering new innovations and inventions as well as developing the Internet for better delivery of pedagogy and enhanced learning.Over the years, being the first creator of Gopher and Websites in Singapore and the region, I have introduced the first gopher sites in 1992, winning the Gold Medal at the MEDINFO’92 Geneva congress, multiple websites in 1993 containing biological databases for teaching and research, video conferencing service in 1994, virtual reality, Java applications, Grid Computing, Cloud Computing and supercomputing in the life sciences.In the early 2000s, I was the lead and host of an S* Life Science Informatics consortium comprising Stanford, Uppsala, Karolinska, Sydney, South African National Bioinformatis Institute and NUS to deliver four years of global education on introductory bioinformatics free of charge. We delivered on Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach via an online platform of Skype, Webcast and CENTRA video conferencing, one of the projects resulted in a publication in an international journal. This development mirrored the growth and development of a second year compulsory module in Introductory Bioinformatics which I have been coordinating before its inception in 1999 as BM1106 and later on as LSM2104 post-LSM integration. We have developed a third year module which I have been coordinating, LSM3241 for more than five years. For graduate students I have introduced Bioinformatics to them through MDG5101. For peer scientists I have regularly conducted workshops from Cambodia to Saudi Arabia, from Lahore to Hyderabad, whether physically or through the network. Today, we have built a network of trained bioinformaticists throughout Asia-Pacific, who are practicising scientists, teachers and research administrators due to my pioneering effort. For the past two decades, to sustain this teaching process, and solidify its outcome, I have been coordinating the running of the International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB), arguably one of the oldest bioinformatics conference series, and biggest Asia event on bioinformatics since 2002.Colleagues and students we have trained have achieved excellence in their subfields. For example, our graduate student Victor Tong, topped his cohort by winning the MIT’s Technology Review global top 35 under 35 years TR35 in 2008. He has since continued this teaching philosophy by mentoring undergraduates and graduates solo, or in collaboration with me, and has since won the Singapore Youth Award 2009 for his impact and role model for the youth. Asif Khan as another of my student has become one of the youngest Asst Professors in Johns Hopkins Medical Institute and now working as Asst Professor in the new Perdana University Graduate School of Medicine, Director of a Centre for Bioinformatics and Dean of School of Data Science, where he continues to collaborate with me on various training programs. Regularly, we are invited by various institutions such as the Federation of Asian Oceanian Biochemists and Molecular Biologists (FAOBMB) and Institute Pasteur to run training courses for or with them in bioinformatics. Another student P Kangueane is now chief editor of an up-coming bioinformatics journal, Bioinformation, and he himself is a venerable teacher in his own right.So my personal teaching philosophy has always been around the mantra of ‘the success of the leader is in his successor’ and ‘the student must surpass his mentor or the mentor has not done his job well’ and ‘technology to the rescue’. In so doing, in view of the technological nature of the subject I have chosen to teach for the past 20 years, I have merged Internet technologies to improve the delivery and reinforcement of learning concepts. For my pioneering efforts in developing the Internet from 1990 to date, not just for teaching but also for research, I was inducted into the Inaugural 2012 class of the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society, the only Singaporean in the 33 global leaders including Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, fathers of the Internet, US Vice President Al Gore, Tim Berners-Lee as inventor of the World Wide Web. This testified to the quality of the impact of my work in bringing Internet technologies to my teaching so much so that it has resulted in spin-off effects of inventing a number of Internet technologies and creating advanced Internet network connectivity on the side, which has resulted in this recognition.More recently, since 2011, I have moved up the computational ladder in expanding on my earlier work in Supercomputing. In 2003, I was part of an international team which won the Most Geographically Distributed High Perfomance Computing Award at the Supercomputing Conference SC’13, for the phylogenetic analysis of arthropods. Since that my interest in Big Data, high performance networking and high performance computing have merged into an effort to promote Supercomputing in Singapore through training, education and resources. As Chairman of the A*STAR Computational Resource Centre (ACRC) I have been actively engaged in outreach and training including coordinating my staff to set up the first Singapore Supercomputing Frontiers Conference 2014, and to set up the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) with a budget of $98 Million. Here my personal philosophy of teaching has led to a major national resource to facilitate transformative education not just in NUS but across Singapore, in the area of using HPC to enhance the competitive edge of our research, development, innovation and education. With this effort, I will be leading a team of talent people to promote the use of HPC and HPC Cloud technology and to educate users in all fields, especially in the life sciences, such as in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), Systems Biology and Synthetic Biology, Bioinformatics, Genomic Precision Medicine, etc. Along the way we have innovated the multiple award winning InfiniCortex to create an InfiniBand galaxy of supercomputing facilities world wide to support us, including the world’s fastest link between Singapore and US at 100Gbps, and between Singapore and EU at 10Gbps. This infrastructure will allow ultra large datasets to be exchanged and studied seamlessly by researchers and their students world wide.My past and present Strategies have been to make use of advanced and cutting edge technologies to advance the teaching agenda. The latest methodologies are built on top of successful proven methodologies in the past.For example, to imbue in students computational thinking skills, we have set up a cloud computing platform and allowed students to access a rich Unix computing environment which we have semi-commercialised as www.bioslax.com. We are continuing to develop this platform such that we can easily support a class of more than 200 students to develop their skills in biocomputational techniques without worrying to much about the mechanics, simply because the system works so cleanly.We have adapted McMaster Problem Based Learning approach as well as the emerging Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) for sequencing learning activities. Hands-on skills are imparted to students through rigorous practical sessions which we have developed over the years. Our students are sought after by research labs who realised that the level of skills among their students who did not take our classes or those recruited from overseas, cannot meet their demands of carrying out 21st Century biology which is critically computaional. So often, my former students bump into me and remark that they are now IT and computing gurus in their research labs where they are working, thanks to attending our courses.I will continue to enhance my teaching approach working with my co-lecturers, and continue to build up our repertoire of technologies to further improve our work of transforming the landscape of biological research into a more computational and informational science. In the past twenty years, when I was first brought in to the Biochemistry Department to beef up the team to transform the department into a molecular biology-enabled team, every single researcher today is involved in using molecular biology. In the next twenty years, I believe that we will transform every single researcher in the department into practicising bioinformatics-enabled researchers from the current state of about 25%.This requires students we train today to acquire these necessary skillsets in bioinformatics and computational biology, a rapidly evolving field, in order to undergo technology transfer by manpower training. jsCall();} else {setTimeout(‘jsCall()’, 500);}}’ jscode=’leoInternalChangeDone()’ />