One-Third of SUTD’s Faculty Ranked Top 2% of World’s Best Scientists

19 Oct 2023

About one-third of the Singapore University of Technology and Design's (SUTD's) faculty members has been ranked amongst the top 2 per cent of the most-cited scientists in the world.
 
The prestigious list, as compiled by Stanford University, is based on the bibliometric information in the Scopus database¹ and includes more than 210,000 researchers from across the globe, classified into 22 scientific fields and 174 subfields.
 
The rankings, which are seen as the gold standard in the scientific research field, showed that 29.3 per cent of SUTD faculty was listed in the top 2 per cent of the world’s best scientific minds in key disciplines like artificial intelligence and image processing, industrial engineering & automation, applied physics as well as networking & telecommunications.
 
A total of 27 faculty members of the design innovation-driven university were ranked, including SUTD President Professor Chong Tow Chong, Provost Professor Phoon Kok Kwang, Associate Provost for Research Professor Chua Chee Kai as well as Head of Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) Professor Tony Quek.
 
Assistant Professor Soujanya Poria, who heads the Deep Cognition and Language Research Lab that focuses on artificial intelligence & image processing, and who was ranked 441 out of a research field of 356,955, said: "Our team is actively addressing the limitations of Large Language Models, enhancing their trustworthiness, responsibility, safety and ethical standards. We are honoured to be part of this highly prestigious list."
 
Soujanya’s team creates Large Language Models that can consume multimodal data such as images, text and audio to solve different challenging tasks. For example, writing a poem, summarising a meeting, generating audio from text input, creating travel plans and more.
 
Of the 27 faculty members who made the list, four were ranked amongst the top 0.1 per cent in their subject field. Other than Assistant Prof Soujanya, the other three were SUTD Provost Prof Phoon Kok Kwang, Associate Provost for Research Prof Chua Chee Kai and Associate Prof Yang Shengyuan.

Prof Phoon, who joined SUTD in 2021 as Provost, is no stranger to awards having been a recipient of numerous awards, including garnering the Norman Medal twice (2005, 2020) – the highest honour granted by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) as well as the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung/Foundation (2017). On top of the awards he has received, Prof Phoon also has extensive experience in the international research arena, being a founding editor of the Georisk journal, Managing Editor of the ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering. In the latest list, Prof Phoon ranked 42 in terms of the single year impact and 76 in terms of career-long impact among his international peers in the field of Geological & Geomatics Engineering in Singapore.

He said: "At SUTD, we redefine design, education and research, and draw on multiple disciplines to make a positive impact on society. Our strong position in the global ranking is a testament of our commitment to academic excellence that underpins our research impact."
 
In addition to Prof Phoon, two other SUTD faculty members – Engineering Product Development Associate Prof Luo Jianxi and Prof Chua Chee Kai, were also ranked top 100 in the world in their subject field. Prof Luo was ranked 51 in the field of design practice & management with a focus on engineering design innovation while Prof Chua was ranked 70 in his subject field of industrial engineering & automation, with a focus on additive manufacturing.

Refer to Annex A for statistics.

1 Scopus is a source-neutral abstract and citation database curated by independent subject matter experts who are recognised leaders in their fields. Scopus indexes content from 7,000+ publishers and includes 91+ million records, 94,000+ affiliation profiles and 17+ million authors.