Speaker： Prof. Chua chee Kai
          NTU
Time：    14:00PM Sept. 18,2009
Location:   Mechanical Building A 701
 
Abstract

Singapore will be spending billions of dollars to develop life sciences, an industry that may surpass the internet in its importance to the economy.  The key pillars of life sciences are healthcare, medical devices, pharmaceuticals and genetics engineering. In recent years, Dr Chua has been involved in the use of Rapid Prototyping for the development of medical devices.  In particular, a lot of effort is focused on the tissue engineering scaffold fabrication.  In this talk, a general overview of NTU and its engineering college will be introduced. The backdrop of Singapore government push into R&D will be painted.  A number of projects involving tissue engineering will be discussed.
 
About the Speaker
 
Dr Chua has been involved in Rapid Prototyping (RP) since 1990. At NTU, he has helped in the application of RP to products like consumer goods, coins, jewelleries and bio-medical applications. On-going research at NTU include development of new systems, pre-processors, solving orientation and support issues, finishing techniques for post-processing of parts, expert system for selection of RP systems and development of new techniques in biomedical applications (prostheses, implants, devices and tissue scaffolds) using RP. 
 
He has been invited as a keynote speaker to several international conferences to speak on the "Trends of Rapid Prototyping" and "Rapid Prototyping in Tissue Engineering", and has sat on the International Programme Committee for more than 10 International Conferences devoted to Rapid Prototyping and other manufacturing technologies. In addition, he has been widely consulted by industries on Rapid Prototyping-related problems. He has contributed more than 200 technical papers in local seminars, technical talks, international conferences and journals. He conducted the RP short course more than 40 times since 1991 for the industry in Singapore and abroad including the Wuhan Automotive University Polytechnic, China, and Thomson Multimedia, Maxtor Peripherals, Flexmech Engineering, Institute of Technical Education, SIMTech, OSIM, Tyco Electronics and Defence Science Organisation (DSO).
  
Dr Chua is the co-author of the book, entitled "Rapid Prototyping: Principles & Applications in Manufacturing" published by John Wiley & Sons in 1997. A Chinese version was translated in 1998. The 2nd edition, "Rapid Prototyping: Principles & Applications" was published by World Scientific in 2003. The Chinese version for the 2nd edition was translated in 2005. The 3rd edition will be published in August 2009, with Chinese and Spanish translations in the offerings.
  
He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Virtual and Physical Prototyping Journal, published by Taylor and Francis. He is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Rapid Prototyping Journal, an international journal devoted to the publication of forefront research in Rapid Prototyping and Tooling. He is also a member of the advisory board for the International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology and the Journal of Materials Processing Technology. He and his research team have won many awards for research excellence. He has also reviewed papers for many international journals and examined both Master and PhD theses for overseas universities. Previously, as the Head of Division for 9 years, he also chaired the examination panel for all PhD students in the division.