I am Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Advanced Robotics and Computationally AugmenteD Environments (ARCADE) Lab, led by Dr. Mathias Unberath, at Johns Hopkins University. My research aims to develop trailblazing assistive and automation technologies that transform healthcare. I particularly focus on transforming healthcare across three complementary domains: (a) clinical training, (b) surgical assistance and automation, and (c) clinical workflow analysis and optimization.

I earned my Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the National University of Singapore (NUS), under the mentorship of Dr. Ren Hongliang. My doctoral thesis, titled “Scene Understanding through Multimodal Reasoning for Robotic Surgery”, focused on pioneering and advancing vision-language models for surgical scene understanding tasks, including surgical visual-question answering (SurgicalGPT & Surgical-VQA) and surgical scene graphs. My work on SurgicalGPT won the MICCAI 2023 STudent Author Registration (STAR) Award. I also hold a Bachelor’s degree (with Honours) in Electrical Engineering from the NUS and a Diploma in Mechatronics from Temasek Polytechnic, Singapore. During my bachelor’s studies, I was awarded the NUS Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Prize and the Faculty of Engineering’s 32nd Innovation & Research Award for my work in the Design-Centric Programme, where our multi-disciplinary team successfully miniaturized surgical tools for minimally invasive surgery using a novel tendon-driven actuation mechanism.

Beyond academia, I bring over four years of industry experience at a robotics startup, where I progressed from a Software Engineer to Engineering Manager, leading the development of delivery robots for the food and warehouse sector. I also have an extensive leadership background, including close to a decade of service as a senior police officer in the Singapore Police Force as part of Singapore’s mandatory national service.

I have authored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers, including MICCAI, ICRA, RA-L, and IJCARS. I have also won multiple academic and leadership awards. For a detailed list, please refer to my CV or Google Scholar.