Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine › Transformational Gift

A transformational gift to the NUS School Of Medicine

Our History In 2005, the National University of Singapore (NUS) School of Medicine celebrated its Centennial with a generous gift of S$100 million from the Yong Loo Lin Trust. The gift is the largest ever presented by a trust in the history of the University.

The School is continually working toward its vision of being among the world’s leading medical schools. The main course of action lies in strengthening its clinical research work and linking it closely with the education of medical students and the clinical care of patients.

How the gift helps
With this gift, the School has been given the means to take practical steps toward that vision in two areas, namely infrastructure and talent base.

Infrastructure
A portion of the gift is being used for significant upgrading of physical infrastructure and facilities.

One example is the Centre for Translational Medicine, the School’s new flagship building with state-of-the-art research and teaching facilities. Expected to be completed in the second half of 2011, it will house some of the most competitive research programmes in cancer and other diseases.

Talent base
The School is now able to develop its talent base in size and research capabilities. This means providing its Faculty team with sufficient time to teach and conduct research on top of their clinical work.

To do this, part of the gift was channeled into Faculty positions, protecting their time and enabling them with the resources to develop work that would advance medical care.

All of these serve to progress the School’s seven areas of focus: cancer, cardiovascular disease, ageing and the neurosciences, gastrointestinal and liver disease, immunology, regenerative medicine and infectious diseases. These conditions are common among Singaporeans and the gift from the Yong Loo Lin Trust provides the means to make headway in combating these diseases.

A lasting legacy honoured
The benefits enabled by the Trust’s gift will continue to help generations of Singaporeans in the years ahead. In honour of this transformational gesture of generosity and also in acknowledgement of the Yong Loo Lin Trust, the School was re-named the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine in 2005.

About Yong Loo Lin
The Kuala Lumpur-born Dr Yong Loo Lin graduated as a medical doctor from the University of Hong Kong in 1923 and subsequently went on to establish himself as a successful businessman in Hong Kong. He was an uncle of Chief Justice Yong Pung How and was known for his strong belief in the importance of education. Dr Yong passed away in 1959.

The Yong Loo Lin Trust was established by his family and has been known to make significant contributions in the name of medicine. In 1996, the Trust gave S$2.5 million to establish the Yong Loo Lin Professorship in Medical Oncology. In 2004, it gave an additional S$1 million to convert the Professorship from a visiting to a full-time Chair. In 2003, it gave S$25 million to NUS for its conservatory, which has since been named the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music after Dr Yong’s daughter, a music teacher.