SMA organised a tea reception in appreciation of its Governing Board (GB) members. Chairman Prof Shih Choon Fong noted SMA's successes of the past year, including the award of the 1st Dual Degrees with MIT, and encouraging employability of SMA graduates.

6 CPE students recently completed their internship with the renowned MIT David H Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice. SMA Connect caught up with Prof Alan Hatton, Director of the School, and found out that the first SMA students at the School survived one of the toughest internship programmes around and received a thumbs up for their performance.

SMA has partnered the Economic Development Board and McKinsey and Company once again for the annual Manufacturing Excellence Awards (MAXA). SMA helped short-list 6 finalists for MAXA 2007. The awards are presented to outstanding companies with manufacturing operations based in Singapore.

SMA alumnus Zhang Zhijian has been riding high on the growth of China's Telecommunications Services market. Within 4 years after graduating from the IMST programme, Zhang had set up two companies and acquired another to provide wireless VAS to mobile phone users in China. Zhang counted Xinhua News Agency and People's Daily among his clients. Read on for his inspiration & start up lessons here.

MST Dual Masters Graduate Zuo Jie received an award for Outstanding Performance from IBM following her internship there. Find out about Zuo Jie's attachment experience, the IBM work culture and her plans after SMA.

AMM&NS PhD candidate Koh Yaw Koon sheds light on the self assembly process of photonic nanocrystals, a potentially cheaper method of material fabrication. Other hot research topics include how rare earth metal can improve MOSFET gate performance, potentially for sub-45nm chips, and how novel Lithium Nickel Manganate & Lithium Nickel Manganese Oxide films can be exploited for high power yet long-lasting battery operations.

Imagine a microfludic platform where varied function probes can catch proteins, detect cancer and pathogens, and land just on the spot you want it to. The reality of such a multi-function, high throughput array has materialised with MEBCS graduate Dr Ng Jin Kiat's work on novel, spatially addressable microarrays.

SMA Research Assistant, Dr Zhao Qin, has won the NUS Dean's Graduate Award for his PhD research on programme optimisation. Zhao developed a set of tools that can boost speeds for software optimisation over 60%, increase the number of watchpoints for debugging to a whopping one million, all while making efficient use of computational resources!

The FY 2007/08 SMA Welfare Committee has made way for a new committee. The outgoing team bowed out after an eventful year packed with activities that fully catered for the SMA staff's welfare. These included an Annual Dinner & Dance, festive celebrations, a BBQ and a trip to Malaysia's rustic seaside village of Kukup.

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