By Cheong Suk-Wai, Senior Writer

HE MAY have injured his back badly in a mountain biking accident in 2003, but Dr Tan Chorh Chuan was exultant when, after a six-year hiatus, he was able to scale some perilous peaks in north India two months ago with his wife.

Difficulty is a dare he relishes, be it scaling cliffs or shaking up the way people here learn, teach and research. His aim is to make his alma mater, the National University of Singapore (NUS), of which he is now president, truly world-class.

Dr Tan, 50, is also deputy chairman of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research. He has long been associated with NUS, having studied there from 1977 till 1983 and been the dean of its medical school from 1997 to 2000. He was director of medical services at the Ministry of Health when Sars hit Singapore in 2003. He was named NUS president in December last year.

The renal physician is slow to take credit and quick to praise his colleagues' endeavours. He credits NUS provost Tan Eng Chye, in particular, as the driving force behind NUS' University Town. Modelled on the residential colleges of Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford and Harvard universities, its first phase will be ready by the 2011 academic year, with the rest up by 2013.

But let Dr Tan tell us more about that himself:

How has NUS changed from when you graduated in 1983?

We now provide our students a global education experience, with more than 40 joint double-degree programmes with global universities and six overseas colleges to hone entrepreneurship. We have also become very research-intensive over a very short period of time, with research funding here growing substantially in the last 10 to 15 years. NUS has also changed rapidly from a British-style system to one (that is closer to) the US system.

Might NUS have lost a few things along the way?

On our Bukit Timah campus of old, there was a degree of intimacy that I think was very useful. In the last 20 years, NUS has grown in size and we've lost some of this sense of belonging. Today, depending on what you (study), you'd be with different groups of people at different times. So it may be less easy for you to form deeper friendships.

That's a big drawback, surely, in an interdependent world?

We're actually taking a number of steps to address this - including one of our most exciting projects ever: the new University Town, to be located where the Warren Golf Course is.

There will be five residential colleges for about 3,000 undergraduates and another two for about 1,700 graduate students. We're going to have groups of maybe 12 to 15 students each in all these colleges. Each of these groups will study together for a year or so, doing up to four modules and exploring topics of global importance, and from an Asian perspective.

So let's say the topic is environmental sustainability and the group has students from Singapore, India, China and Switzerland. Sustainability would mean very different things to each of these students, so when they look at each other's perspectives, they will get a richer understanding of the issues, and of one another.

What of those who can't live in University Town?

We have three different types of hostels for students: University Town's colleges; our current halls of residence that have more than 7,000 beds; and dormitory-style living at Prince George's Park.

Might only your best students get to live in University Town?

Those living in University Town should contribute to its intellectual, social and cultural vibrancy. It will be a bit of a waste if people just went there and used it as a place to sleep at night. I'm actually looking at how we can find ways to allow all students, particularly those in their first year, to partake of that rich and vibrant learning environment.

In all this, how do you strike a balance between the need to teach well and the need for breakthrough research?

Almost all NUS faculty members teach undergraduates. And we look closely at their ability to teach when we appoint, promote or give them tenure. It's important that students learn not just knowledge, but also how to think critically, from their professors.

You spoke recently about having integrative research clusters. What's that about?

The world faces very complex and important issues today, such as environmental sustainability, ageing and health care. If you just studied aspects of these issues, you would get a narrow but deep understanding of small slivers of these issues, but you wouldn't be able to tackle them more fully.

So how can clusters help?

Take, for example, the Finance And Risk Management Cluster. Over the last two or three years, we've built a Risk Management Institute and one of the major areas it's working on now is a new credit rating system for Asian firms. Another component in this cluster is Real Estate Studies, with faculty members from economics, business, statistics and computer science. The cluster also has a resource centre for quantitative finance. Recently, the cluster brainstormed about one really important question to work on together and came up with how to ensure adequate financing for retirees.

And how do they do that, exactly?

The Real Estate Institute is starting to work on the refinancing of mortgages, which requires the correct pricing of refinancing and default risks. This pricing is worked out by our Risk Management Institute using mathematical models. But these models may not always be accurate, particularly when the market is very volatile. So the Real Estate Institute is starting to study household borrowers' behaviour, which drives refinancing and default risks.

But why clusters? Couldn't you get people to work with one another already?

It is not so easy to get people to work spontaneously by themselves! It's critical that there are mechanisms for experts to get together regularly and ask: 'What are the important questions that we would be able to answer well if we worked together?'

What hurdles might there be to doing this?

Well, we will have to raise money for these things. We seed it with some of our endowment returns. But for this to go well, we will have to raise a lot of funds.

Why don't academics try to work more often on real-world issues instead of pursuing the eclectic and esoteric?

I'm not sure that's true. And if you want to tackle most studies seriously, you can't flit from one problem to another; you have to go deep into just one. But the problem with that, then, is that you cannot take on a great deal of complexity. And so the clustering is about bringing together people who do deep work on their own but can tackle larger issues with others. But cross-disciplinary work can be very risky.

How so?

Say I were a computer scientist and used IT to address difficult biological questions. The biologist could see this as fantastic and first-class work but to other computer scientists, it might not break new ground in their area.

So those who cross over get less credit?

Yes! And that tends to inhibit people from going beyond their areas. There are also genuine differences in the way people look at issues based on their training.

Recently, I worked with one of our statistics dons on modelling epidemics. I'd ask him: 'Anthony, can you translate what all these mathematics mean into English?' And then he would explain what all these mathematics mean. And I'd say: 'Anthony, this does not conform at all with the real world, based on my experience with Sars.' Then Anthony would say: 'Oh, I see' - and go back and modify his work. We work till we see eye to eye on it. To really collaborate, we have to cross barriers.

So, really, you are competing against yourselves.

Yes. The clusters are pretty novel and will be difficult to do. But I'm interested in pursuing this precisely because it's difficult to do. If we can do it well, it will help differentiate NUS' research efforts.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.