Research Assistant Professorship (RAP)

Young and research-intensive, Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) is ranked among the world’s top universities. NTU has a vibrant research ecosystem with a high proportion of early-career researchers. It has a healthy environment for interdisciplinary research collaboration and the research is well funded. 

The Research Assistant Professorship (RAP) scheme aims to attract early career researchers focusing on research in particularly competitive areas. The RAP recipients must be sought after and of the highest rank. They are expected to bring special skills and expertise to NTU.

Hiring Criteria​​

  • RAP scheme targets early career researchers (i.e. postdoctoral fellows or research fellows) within 4 years of obtaining PhD. or equivalent degree in competitive research areas
  • RAP recipients must be sought after and of the highest rank.
  • Staff hired as Non-Faculty and Grant-Based RAPs are under the Research Staff scheme.
  • The recipient’s formal position is as a Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow within the NTU Research Staff Scheme with a fixed term of 2-3 years contingent upon the availability of external competitive research grants (e.g., industry funding) from their NTU mentor. 
  • During their appointment period, the recipient may use the title Research Assistant Professor.
  • RAP recipient does not provide a direct pathway to an academic position at NTU.
  • Salary range is competitive and will be based on the market rate.

Prioritised Competitive Research Areas

  • Artificial & Augmented Intelligence
  • Ageing-Related Research
  • Biofilm and Microbiomes 
  • Brain & Learning Culture & Creativity
  • Culture, Organisations & Society
  • Cybersecurity
  • Defence and Security
  • Earth
  • Education & Transformation
  • FinTech/InsurTech
  • Food Science and Technology 
  • Future of Industry
  • Geopolitics of Emerging and Disruptive Technologies
  • Great Power Politics in the Indo-Pacific Region
  • Green finance
  • Health & Society
  • Human Behaviour & Technology
  • Interdisciplinary HealthTech and Biomedical Innovations 
  • Language & Heritage
  • Leadership & Disruptive Innovation
  • Mobility & Transportation
  • Photonics
  • Resilient Urbanisation & Natural Ecosystems
  • Satellite Related Research
  • Sustainability & Resilience
  • Water-Related Research 

Application Process

  • There will be 2 RAP Calls per year. The 1st RAP Call for 2024 is currently open for applications till 28 March 2024.
  • As the successful awardees will be funded by the NTU mentor’s external competitive grants, candidates interested in applying for the RAP scheme are required to contact their potential mentor and work with the potential mentor in preparing their application package. Candidates can browse potential NTU mentors using this link: https://www.ntu.edu.sg/research/faculty-directory
  • Required documents for submission:
  1. Online application form (Click here to submit your online application)
  2. Cover Letter (what you have to offer and why you chose NTU)
  3. CV with Full Publication List (with information on citation and impact factor)
  4. Research proposal developed in consultation with NTU mentors.

    Please be concise and keep the proposal within two (2) A4-size pages. Your proposal should include the following sections:

    • Background and rationale for your proposal
    • Methodology employed, emphasising the uniqueness of the approach
    • Challenges that maybe encountered and how they would be overcome
    • Appropriateness of your training and experience
    • Indicators used to measure the success of the project 
  5. Letter of support from NTU mentor, confirming the mentor’s interest in supporting the candidate with the mentor’s external competitive funding.
  6. Degree transcripts/certificates.
  7. At least two reference letters from your referees. One of them must be your PhD supervisor. Kindly request your referees to deposit their reference letters directly into the online system latest by 04 April 2024, 11:59 P.M. (UTC / GMT +8:00)


The application evaluation will usually take around 1-2 months. Only shortlisted candidates will be notified/contacted.

Queries can be directed at [email protected]

NTU is an equal-opportunity employer. The University is dedicated to the goal of building a culturally diverse and pluralistic university comprising faculty and staff who are committed to research, teaching and working in a multicultural environment. We invite individuals of diverse gender, ethnicity, and other under-represented groups, including those with disabilities, to apply.

 

​​​Awardees​

Feng Kaiyu

Feng Kaiyu 

Project Title: Deep Learning for Big Spatial Data Management
Singtel Cognitive and Artificial Intelligence Lab for Enterprises (SCALE@NTU) ​

 

Kaiyu Feng is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He obtained his PhD degree in computer science from NTU in 2018, under the supervision of Professor Cong Gao. His research interests include spatial database management and graph database. He is particularly interested in querying geo-taged data stream, spatial data visualization, efficient processing of spatial queries and graph and social data analysis. He has published  papers in premium venues in these areas such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, WWW, and the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

RAP - Ng Wei Long

Ng Wei Long

Project Title: Biofabrication of Human Skin Tissue Models using 3D Bioprinting Approaches​​
HP-NTU Digital Manufacturing Corporate Lab​
Email: [email protected]

 

Ng Wei Long is a Research Assistant Professor at HP-NTU Digital Manufacturing Corporate Lab, and his current research focuses on the bioprinting of 3D human-based tissue models. Wei Long was awarded the A*STAR Graduate Scholarship (AGS) in year 2013 to pursue his Ph.D. on skin bioprinting under the supervision of Dr May Win Naing (SIMTech, A*STAR) and Assistant Professor Yeong Wai Yee (School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE), NTU). As a Ph.D. candidate, his key research is on developing of novel bio-inks and engineering functional microenvironment for 3D bioprinted in-vitro human tissue models. After his Ph.D., he worked as a Research Fellow under the supervision of Professor Chua Chee Kai at the Singapore Centre of 3D Printing (SC3DP) and then subsequently under the supervision of Associate Professor Yeong Wai Yee at HP-NTU Digital Manufacturing Corporate Lab. In August 2020, Wei Long took on his new appointment as a Research Assistant Professor to continue his research on 3D bioprinting of human-based tissue models.​


RAP - Cao Yixin

Cao Yi Xin

Project Title: Fine-grained Domain Knowledge Acquisition with Limited Supervision​​​
S-Lab for Advanced Intelligence
Previous affiliation: PhD (Computer Science), National University of Singapore, 2018 
Email: [email protected]

 

Cao Yixin was a research fellow with NExT++, National University of Singapore (NUS). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University in 2018​. His research interests span natural language processing, knowledge graph and recommendation. Various part of his works has been published in top conferences, such as ACL, EMNLP, COLING and WWW. Cao Yi Xin has also served as PC member for several conferences including ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI, IJCAI, and NeurIPs, and as reviewers for journals including TKDE, TKDD, TASLP and IEEE Access.

RAP - Bo Dai

Bo Dai

Project Title: Beyond Visual Perception: Towards Multi-Modality Perception and Imagination ​​​
S-Lab for Advanced Intelligence
Previous affiliation: PhD (Information Engineering), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2018
Email: [email protected]

 

Dai Bo was a research fellow (2018-2020) in MMLab@CUHK. His research interests include computer vision and machine learning. Recently, his research focus is on generative models, video analysis, and cross-modality analysis. He received his PhD (2014-2018) from CUHK. He obtained his BEng (2010-2014) from ACM class of SJTU. Previously, he had an internship at Microsoft Research Asia. He also visited University of Toronto in 2017.

Phyllis Liang

Phyllis Liang

Project Title: Data driven healthcare: Trajectory and predictors of quality of life for individuals with stroke
Rehabilitation Research Institute of Singapore
Previous affiliation: PhD, The University of Queensland, Australia
Email: [email protected]

 

Phyllis Liang is a Research Assistant Professor and principal investigator at the Rehabilitation Research Institute of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University. She is a senior occupational therapist and specialises in neurological rehabilitation. She completed her PhD at The University of Queensland, Australia. Phyllis is an experienced clinician and have worked in various healthcare contexts and settings across Singapore and Australia. She uses both qualitative and quantitative approaches. She is an editorial board member of Hong Kong Journal of Occupational Therapy and a research mentor in the Singapore Association of Occupational Therapy.

Li Yuekang

Li Yuekang

Project Title: Intelligent Vulnerability Detection via Adaptive Analysis for Software
Continental-NTU Corporate Lab: Future-Oriented Continental's Urban Society (FOCUS) Lab
Previous affiliation: PhD, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University
Email: [email protected]

 

Yuekang Li is currently a Research Assistant Professor in Continental-NTU Corporate Lab, Singapore. Prior to that, he received his B.Eng degree and Ph.D from Nanyang Technological University in 2016 and 2020. His research interests include program analysis, software testing and software security. He has publications in top-tier software engineering and security conferences such as FSE, ICSE, CCS and USENIX etc.

Jessica Dang

Jessica Dang

Project Title: Pandemic Risk Financing Solution
Insurance Risk and Finance Research Centre
Email: [email protected]

 

Jessica Dang is a Research Assistant Professor at the Insurance Risk and Finance Research Centre. Her current research project is supporting the Global-Asia Insurance Partnership, a tripartite partnership between the global insurance industry, regulators and policymakers, and academia. Her project focuses on how the insurance sector can contribute to an economy that is more resilient to emerging risks such as the pandemic risk. Jessica received her PhD in Actuarial Science from the University of Waterloo in 2021. Her research interests also include Monte Carlo simulation design, retirement and insurance product design, and financial risk management. She was a Society of Actuaries James C. Hickman Scholar. Jessica has had 10 years of experience working as an actuary at insurance and consulting firms in Canada. She is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries.

Arun Prasanth Nagalingam

Arun Prasanth Nagalingam

Project Title: Evidence-based digital surface enhancement for in-situ roughness monitoring of complex space rocket/fuel injector components using artificial intelligence techniques
Rolls-Royce@NTU Corporate Lab, Singapore
Email: [email protected]

 

Arun works as a Research Assistant Professor (RAP) at the Rolls-Royce@NTU Corporate Lab, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Through cutting-edge technology development and commercialization, he contributes to the Singapore 2030 Advanced Manufacturing Hub (AMH) and Jurong Innovation District (JID) initiatives. In addition, Arun is the IPT-Lead of the Manufacturing Technologies programme at Rolls-Royce and manages several projects, researchers, interns, and students.

Arun holds several professional memberships, including the European society for precision engineering and nanotechnology (euspen), project management institute (PMI) Singapore chapter etc. He is an active young member of the institute of mechanical engineers (IMechE) and works with student chapters to develop component engineers at NTU.

Arun’s doctoral work includes the development of a novel post-process surface finishing technique for additively manufactured complex internal passages in aerospace components. He utilized cavitation (a phenomenon that was stated uncontrollable and destructive in the marine industry), harnessed its intensity through a novel machine design, and constructively used it for surface engineering of hard-to-machine materials, including Titanium, Inconel, and Haynes. The process is deemed sustainable as water is the primary working fluid with just a 1.0 % addition of abrasives (while conventional techniques use 60-80 % abrasives). His other research work includes developing and modeling the intelligent vibratory polishing process of 6-stage blisks, additive manufacturing topology optimization and thermal simulations of aircraft electrical engines, etc. In collaboration with the Singapore Centre for 3D Printing (SC3DP), his past research work includes multimaterial polymer, fiber 3D printing of lightweight structures, dynamic materials testing, and non-destructive inspection of crack initiation in complex lattice structures.

In his research portfolio, Arun has several awards, patents, journals, conference proceedings, books, and posters related to advanced manufacturing technologies. In addition, he also serves as a guest editor and reviewer in several international journals, including Additive Manufacturing, Powder Technology, the Journal of Manufacturing Processes, Materials, Coatings, etc.

Bing Song

Bing Song

Project Title: Towards Saft Robot Learning in the Real World
HP-NTU Digital Manufacturing Corporate Lab
Email: [email protected]

 

Bing Song is a Research Assistant Professor at HP-NTU Digital Manufacturing Corporate Lab, and she currently focuses on bridging control and reinforcement learning for robotics. Bing Song received her PhD in Control Theory Lab at Columbia University (2018). Her PhD focused on iterative learning control, specifically how to utilize data and dynamic model in learning. She expanded her research to robotics afterwards at Robotic Manipulation and Mobility Lab from 2019 to 2020 at Columbia University.

Lam Bhan

Lam Bhan

Project Title: Towards a scalable, autonomous, self-learning, ambient-adaptive Soundscape evaluation, augmentation, and monitoring (SEAM) system
SMART Nation Lab, School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering
Email: [email protected]

 

Lam Bhan is a Research Assistant Professor at the Smart Nation Lab at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received the B.Eng. (Hons.) and Ph.D. degrees both from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2013 and 2019, respectively. In 2015, he was a visiting postgrad in the signal processing and control group at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, University of Southampton, UK. He was previously a research fellow at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has authored more than 40 refereed journal articles and conference papers in the areas of acoustics, soundscape, and signal processing for active control. Dr. Lam was awarded the NTU Research Scholarship and EEE Graduate Award to undertake his PhD under the supervision of Professor Woon-Seng Gan. He was an invited tutorial speaker at APSIPA ASC 2020.

Li Chongyi

Li Chongyi

Project Title: Visual Perception Enhancement and Beyond in an Open World
MMLab@NTU, S-Lab for Advanced Intelligence

Email: [email protected]

Chongyi Li is a Research Assistant Professor with the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Prior to this position, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the same university, from 2020 to 2021, and City University of Hong Kong (CityU), from 2018 to 2020. He received his Ph.D. (2018) from Tianjin University under a joint training program with Australian National University. His research interests include image processing, computer vision, and deep learning, particularly in the domains of image restoration and enhancement. He published papers in top-tier journals and conferences, such as TPAMI, TIP, CVPR, ECCV, NeurIPs, etc. Among them, four papers were recognized as ‘ESI Highly Cited Paper’. He serves as an Associate Editor of the Springer Journal of Signal, Image and Video Processing and a Guest Editor of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering. He served as a senior program committee at AAAI 2022. He was selected as ‘Outstanding Reviewer’ of CVPR 2021 and ICCV 2021.

Shi Dongyuan

Shi Dongyuan

Project Title: Urban Noise Cancelling: Intelligent Anti-noise Window
SMART Nation Lab, School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering

Email: [email protected]

Shi Dongyuan is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He completed his Ph.D. at the Nanyang Technological University under the supervision of Professor Gan Woon Seng. His research interests include advanced active noise control, deep learning, digital signal processing, adaptive array processing, and high-speed real-time digital system implementation. His work has been published in the Journals such as the journal of Acoustic Society of America (JASA), ACM/IEEE Transaction on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP), IEEE transaction on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) system, Signal Processing (SP), IEEE Signal Letter (SPL), Mechanical Systems, and Signal Processing (MSSP), and IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP). He is currently a member of the IEEE and Signal Processing Society (SPS). He serves as the associate editor of IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications, and Computer Sciences and the first guest editor of Applied Science.

Wang Xinrun

Wang Xinrun

Project Title: Very Large-Scale Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
School of Computer Science and Engineering

Email: [email protected]

Xinrun Wang is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He obtained his PhD degree in computer science from NTU in 2020, under the supervision of Associate Professor Bo An. His research interests include algorithmic game theory, reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. He has published more than 10 papers at top AI conferences, i.e., AAAI, IJCAI, ICLR and NeurIPS.

Wang Xinrun

Teng Zhiyang

Project Title: Towards Few-shot Temporal Sentence Video Grounding in the Wild
S-Lab for Advanced Intelligence
Email:
[email protected]

Zhiyang Teng currently holds the position of Research Assistant Professor at the S-Lab for Advanced Intelligence, within the School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He was a research fellow in Westlake University from 2018 to 2022. He obtained his PhD degree from SUTD in 2018. His research interests include natural language processing (NLP) and temporal sentence video grounding. He is the second author of the NLP textbook, "Natural Language Processing: A Machine Learning Perspective," published by Cambridge University Press. He has published papers in top-tier venues including ACL, EMNLP, TACL and NAACL. In addition, he served as an area chair for EMNLP 2021, AACL-IJCNLP 2022, and EMNLP 2022.

Wang Xinrun

Wang Jiabo

Project Title: Where Cryptography Meets Coding Theory: Secure Communication and Computing
Strategic Centre for Research in Privacy-Preserving Technologies
Email:
[email protected]

Jiabo Wang is a Research Assistant Professor and principal investigator at the Strategic Centre for Research in Privacy-Preserving Technologies and Systems, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Prior to joining NTU, he was a Research Fellow at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, between 2021 and 2022. He received his PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Imperial College London, UK, in 2021. Jiabo’s research interest includes coding theory, lattices-based cryptography, code-based cryptography, and privacy-preserving technologies. His current project focuses on the enhancement of privacy-preserving technologies, e.g., private set intersection and zero-knowledge proof, and on tackling challenges of privacy protection in real-world situations.

Wang Xinrun

Wang Yuanzhe

Project Title: Safe Navigation of Automated Quay Crane
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Email
: [email protected]

Yuanzhe Wang is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He obtained the B.Eng. degree from Southeast University, China, in 2010, the M.Eng. degree from Beihang University, China, in 2013, and the Ph.D. degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2019. His current research interests include mobile robotics, intelligent vehicles and cyber security. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) since 2020.

Wang Xinrun

Shuai Yang

Project Title: Intelligent Visual Content Creation and Editing
S-Lab for Advanced Intelligence
Previous affiliation: PhD (Computer Applied Technology), Peking University, 2020
Email:
[email protected]

Shuai Yang received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees (Hons.) in computer science from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 2015 and 2020, respectively. He was a Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, from Oct. 2020 to Feb. 2023. He was a Visiting Scholar with the Texas A&M University, from Sep. 2018 to Sep. 2019. He was a Visiting Student with the National Institute of Informatics, Japan, from Mar. 2017 to Aug. 2017. He received the IEEE ICME 2020 Best Paper Awards and IEEE MMSP 2015 Top10% Paper Awards. 

Wang Xinrun

Stephen Chua Chong Wei

Project Title: Quaternary Archives of past environmental, climate and sea-level change in Singapore
Earth Observatory of Singapore
Email:
[email protected]

Stephen Chua is a Research Assistant Professor working on past sea level, climate and coastal change in Singapore and the region, using geological archives for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. Stephen joined the Interdisciplinary Graduate School, NTU under the supervision of Assoc Prof Adam Switzer and Prof Benjamin Horton as a PhD student in 2014. He received an Endeavour Research Fellowship in 2017 to conduct isotopic analysis of sediments at the Advanced Analytical Centre, James Cook University, Cairns. He sat on the Singapore Stratigraphic Committee (2014 – 2021) and led the collaborative re-evaluation of the Quaternary geology of Singapore as well as co-authored the landmark Singapore Geology Memoir (2021). Stephen is currently the Principal Investigator of a project that uses a multiproxy approach (i.e., geophysics, water quality, sediment coring and analysis) to understand climate change impacts on Singapore's offshore water resources.

Hu Qinghao

Project Title: Building Efficient System Infrastructure for Large-Scale Generative AI 
S-Lab for Advanced Intelligence
Email: [email protected]

Qinghao Hu obtained his Ph.D. degree from NTU in 2023. Before that, he received M.Sc. degree from NUS in 2020 and B.Eng. degree from Zhejiang University in 2018. His research focuses on machine learning systems and datacenter scheduling. Qinghao has published his research work in top-tier conferences, including NSDI, OSDI, ASPLOS, ATC and SC, in the field of computer systems, networking and high-performance computing. Notably, Qinghao received the Distinguished Paper Award of ASPLOS ’23 and Youth Outstanding Paper Award of WAIC ‘23. He is also a recipient of the Google PhD Fellowship.

 

Zhang Yinan

Project Title: Persuasive Recommendations for A Healthy and Sustainable Lifestyle
Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute

Email:
[email protected]

Zhang Yinan is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. She obtained her PhD degree in computer science from NTU in 2023, under the supervision of Professor Miao Chun Yan. Her research interests include recommender systems, green intelligence, and AI for healthcare. She has published multiple papers in top-tier AI conferences and journals, such as KDD, IJCAI, TKDE, and CIKM