SOCRATES Executives

Research Director (A*STAR IMCB)

Dr Lim Sai Kiang graduated with B.Sc (Hons in Biochemistry) from National University of Singapore in 1985. She did her PhD thesis on the metabolism of thalassemic mRNA under Prof Lynne Maquat (Dept. of Human Genetics, Roswell Park Cancer Institute), and was awarded the Most Meritorious Student Research Award by Sigma Xi Society in 1989, NY State Predoctoral Fellowship (1989-91) and a PhD (Molecular Biology) from SUNY at Buffalo in 1992.

In 1992, she started postdoctoral training on erythroid differentiation with Prof Frank Constantini (Dept. of Genetics and Development College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University) first as a Cooley’s Anemia Foundation Research Fellow (1992-94) and then a Leukemia Society of America Special Fellow (1994-96).

After postdoctoral training, she led independent research groups at NUMI, NUS (1996-2001), Genome Institute of Singapore (2002-2007) and  Institute of Medical Biology (2007 – 2021) and now Institute of Molecular Cell Biology (2021). Her research focus has always been disease-related with emphasis on the elucidation of the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms in diseases and development of therapies.

Her current major research interests are derivation of clinically useful cell types such as mesenchymal stem cells and insulin-producing cell lines from either human or mouse embryonic stem cells and the use of these cells or their products to treat or better understand human diseases.