This cluster examines how leaders and organisations navigate uncertainty, complexity, and rapid disruption in evolving technological and institutional environments. It focuses on leadership and decision-making processes that drive innovation, strategic change, and organisational resilience, with particular attention to governance, entrepreneurial leadership, and behavioural responses to emerging shocks. Importantly, the cluster distinguishes disruption from innovation, recognising that not all disruption is beneficial; rather, leadership is understood as the capacity to channel disruption into paradigm-shifting innovation that generates meaningful and positive impact. A central concern is how organisations remain sufficiently stable while undergoing transformation, maintaining core structures and values even as change unfolds. This highlights the importance of leadership judgment in determining what should change and what should remain constant. The cluster also examines the characteristics of leaders and followers that enable effective adaptation, including cognitive flexibility, ethical orientation, motivation, trust, and responsiveness to guidance, as well as the relational dynamics through which influence is exercised and received. In addition, it considers the role of entrepreneurship in identifying and exploiting opportunities under uncertainty, fostering innovation, and translating novel ideas into scalable impact, as well as the education and development of future leaders. Integrating perspectives from policy, curriculum, and leadership studies, the cluster generates critical insights that advance both scholarly understanding and practical impact across sectors. A key emphasis is on analysing leadership planning and development across government, business, and educational settings at national, regional, and global levels to identify lessons, opportunities, and challenges for cultivating adaptive and future-ready leadership.

This cluster investigates how digital and emerging technologies — such as artificial intelligence (AI), sensor technologies, quantum technologies, data analytics, and digital platforms — are reorganising societies, economies, policy regimes, security practices, communication, culture, and education. It brings together research on technology adoption, adaptation, deployment and development with studies of algorithmic decision-making, digital governance, and the uneven social consequences of technological change in both advanced economies and developing countries. Alongside these concerns, the cluster foregrounds critical issues of cybersecurity, ethics, digital harm, resilience, and social cohesion, asking who is protected, who is exposed, and under what conditions. At the same time, the cluster advances interdisciplinary work in digital humanities and cultural studies, tracing AI’s impact on language, creativity, and everyday cultural practices, as well as the evolving dynamics of the digital economy and digital capitalism. In parallel, it examines the transformative role of AI and data in education, with a focus on techno-pedagogical design, learning analytics, and new forms of assessment that can support meaningful learning rather than simply automate it. Through these integrated efforts, the cluster seeks to promote responsible innovation, strengthen societal resilience, and ensure that technological advancement expands human capabilities, enriches cultural diversity, and contributes to more just, sustainable, and liveable techno-social futures.

This cluster examines how education systems, institutional arrangements and policy, and societal contexts shape human potential across the life course in an era of rapid technological and societal change. Drawing on psychology, human development, education research, the social sciences, neuroscience, and the learning sciences, the cluster’s research examines teaching and learning across the lifespan, from early childhood through adulthood, with particular attention to Singapore’s multilingual and multicultural context. The cluster bridges research, practice, and policy by addressing key issues including the development of core cognitive and socioemotional skills, school readiness, inequality, skill formation, workforce readiness, and the future of work, while strengthening pedagogical practice, character and citizenship education, and science and humanities curricula. Through an ecological perspective connecting individuals, schools, communities, and society, the cluster works to promote educational equity and optimise human potential and outcomes, including academic and socioemotional development. It also examines how artificial intelligence is transforming education and work and explores innovative pathways for teacher education and lifelong learning that prepare educators and learners for lifelong flourishing and resilient functioning, while strengthening their adaptability to respond to evolving labour markets and changing societal needs.

This cluster advances interdisciplinary research at the intersection of healthcare organisations, socio-cultural contexts, and emerging health technologies with a focus on areas where NTU holds genuine comparative advantage and the potential to achieve significant breakthroughs. This cluster concentrates its strategic energy on three areas of distinctive strength: (i) AI- and data-enabled healthcare delivery and digital therapeutics; (ii) healthy ageing and caregiving in multicultural societies; and (iii) the socio-cultural determinants of health inequality and system resilience. . It integrates SHAPE and STEM capabilities to address complex challenges on governance, equity, and translational impact. Singapore’s demographic profile and the combined expertise of CoHASS, NIE, and NBS offer a research context of direct relevance to funders including MOE, the Wellcome Trust, NRF, and the WHO. CoHASS possesses strengths in lived experience research, communication, and narrative inquiry to generate insights that complement biomedical approaches and appeal to interdisciplinary funding panels. NIE contributes expertise on holistic, multilevel approaches to wellbeing, NBS provides expertise on the role of emerging health teachnologies in shaping access, engagement, and care experiences, and RSIS offers expertise on biosecurity governance and multilateral frameworks on health security. The cluster will prioritise cross-institutional partnerships that enable competitive proposals for Tier 2 and SSRC grants and international schemes within the first two years. Other areas under the broad terrain of health and society remain relevant but will be pursued opportunistically rather than as primary strategic commitments, ensuring that the cluster’s resources are concentrated where the case for NTU leadership and genuine breakthroughs are strongest.

This cluster advances an interdisciplinary approach to environment and sustainability, integrating NBS’s distinctive expertise in sustainable finance, climate risk measurement and management, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) with CoHASS’s strengths in the arts, humanities, and cultural studies. In particular, the cluster leverages emerging methodologies—including machine learning and AI—to better measure climate risk exposure, analyse firm and market responses, and develop scalable solutions to sustainability challenges. Research focuses on environmental risks and green transitions through core areas including carbon markets, regulatory effects on firms and markets, cultural preservation, environmental communication, and the biocultural dimensions of ecological change. Anchored by NTU-wide capabilities—such as the Centre for Sustainable Finance and Innovation (CSFI), the Centre for Contemporary Art, environmental humanities clusters, and broader sustainability initiatives—the cluster connects urban sustainability, maritime ecologies, and climate impacts on food systems with education-focused research on sustainability leadership, curriculum innovation, and climate literacy. Collectively, the cluster generates policy-relevant insights and fosters cross-disciplinary collaboration to support Asia’s transition toward resilient, low-carbon, and socially embedded sustainable futures.

The Global Asia cluster advances high-impact, interdisciplinary research programmes examining Asia’s role in reshaping the global economy, geopolitical order, and the movement of peoples, ideas, and institutions. Rather than treating Asia as a bounded region, the cluster positions it as a central arena of structural change—where geopolitical competition, economic transformation, and societal shifts are unfolding with global implications. These transformations are examined not only in material and institutional terms, but also their ethical, cultural, and educational consequences. This cluster focuses on how these global transformations shape lived experiences, institutional adaptation, and policy responses, including the role of education systems in preparing individuals and societies to navigate complex and evolving global conditions. Leveraging strengths from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, the Global Asia Research Centre, Nanyang Business School, and the National Institute of Education, the cluster will examine the following priority areas: (i) Geopolitics and Regional Order: Assesses evolving security dynamics, major power competition, and institutional change in the Indo-Pacific, and their implications for regional and global order, including the governance of emerging technologies and shifting normative frameworks. (ii) Economic Transformation and Regional Integration: Focuses on shifts in production, trade, finance, and technology, including supply chain reconfiguration, AI and digitalisation, and evolving state–market relations, alongside their broader societal and developmental implications. (iii) Education and Globalization: Explores how geopolitical and societal shifts shape the education of children, youth, and adults, and how education systems and policies develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to respond to global transformations. (iv) Societies, Governance, and Resilience: Examines how demographic, social, and cultural changes interact with governance systems, with attention to inequality, mobility, social cohesion, and the formation of values and citizenship in contexts of rapid change.

The “Open” category is for topics or proposals that do not fit neatly in the six clusters. The aim is to allow researchers to identify and explore emerging and innovative topics that may contribute significantly to the research objectives of NTU in the medium- to long-term. This category welcomes all research topics as long as the scope falls within the discipline of arts, social sciences, humanities, business, education and security studies broadly defined.

Current Working Group Lead: Assoc Prof Bhubhindar Singh Bhandal