Adjunct Professor Alfred Huan

Assistant Chief Executive
Science & Engineering Research Council (SERC), A*STAR



Biographical Information
Prof Alfred Huan received his education at the University of Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in Physics, working on acoustic interactions in low temperature paramagnetic insulators. He is currently the Assistant Chief Executive, Science & Engineering Research Council (SERC) at A*STAR, through which he is responsible for the implementation of A*STAR’s strategic plans and initiatives in the Science and Engineering arena. Prof Huan had held a wide spectrum of leadership appointments to set and drive strategies throughout his career, enabling departments and institutions to fulfil its mission.
 Prof Huan’s earliest contribution to A*STAR was when he was the Manager and Principal Scientist of Materials Characterisation Lab at IMRE, A*STAR, from 1998 to 2010. In 2011, he was seconded to SERC, A*STAR, as the Director of Special Projects. In 2012, he was appointed the Acting Executive Director of Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), and later assumed the position of full Executive Directorship from 2013 to 2018. During the same period, he held a concurrent appointment as Executive Director, A*STAR Graduate Academy, where he led the division that seeks to make A*STAR a global nexus for talent, nurturing the next generation of talented scientists and researchers who will spearhead Singapore’s ambition of becoming a world-class scientific hub. In 2017, he added the role of Executive Director, IMRE, to his portfolio and led the research institute in building strong capabilities to conduct world-class materials science research.

Prior to A*STAR, Prof Huan had acquired considerable academic and research experience in the academia at NUS and NTU to pursue an outstanding career with A*STAR. At NUS, he was the Deputy Head in the Department of Physics, and worked on surface science and epitaxial thin films for his research. In 2005, he left NUS along with some colleagues to establish a new school at NTU – the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (SPMS), where he began as Head of Division of Physics & Applied Physics. Subsequently, he was appointed Associate Chair (Outreach & Admissions) and led outreach initiatives in promoting the attractiveness of the undergraduate programmes, thereby contributing to the School’s admission strategies. For his research at NTU, he focused on ultrafast charge and energy transfer in organics and II-VI semiconductor nanostructures, in particular the roles of defect states and the effect of dopants, leading to rich optical phenomenon exciton relaxation and charge dissociation. To date, he has published >250 research papers with a total citation count of 9,852 and h-index of 54 (Google Scholar).