Inside View: Bertil Andersson, President of NTU and Imperial Fellow

We caught up with Professor Bertil Andersson, leader of Asia's fastest rising University, as he visited the UK with Singapore's Head of State.

Q. As former Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, do you have any thoughts on this month’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for super resolution light microscopy?

It’s a fantastic prize; a very innovative application of chemistry. I recently joked that this year the Physics Prize was in engineering and the Chemistry Prize was in physics, but that may well be a sign of the times. As a University President I’m always talking about interdisciplinary research and this is perhaps an example of it manifesting even in the Nobel Prizes. When Alfred Nobel wrote his will back in 1896 it was clearer cut – chemistry was chemistry, physics was physics and medicine was medicine, but now things have moved on and there is a big overlap.

Interestingly, when I was Chair of the Chemistry Committee, we started to have a joint meeting with the Physics Committee – in addition to the meetings we already had with medicine – because it would be very embarrassing if in Stockholm the same person got a Nobel Prize in more than one category!

Your own research into artificial photosynthesis crosses into engineering somewhat doesn't it?

That’s right. I’ve always been fascinated by the miracle that happened two and a half billion years ago, when nature learned to split water with the help of solar energy. That invention has only happened once and I sometimes picture myself as an industrial spy, trying to figure out how nature did this.

Professor James Barber of Imperial, a former collaborator of mine, did much for the field by resolving  the molecular details of the photosynthetic process and was also one of the first who devised this concept of making artificial photosynthetic or the artificial leaf, which myself and others subsequently worked on. He told me once: ‘If plants can do it, we can do it; after all it’s only chemistry’. Professor Barber now has a lab in NTU and I plan to pay a visit next week – I’m not completely done as a scientist yet!

NTU has enjoyed an unprecedented ascent in the global higher education rankings in a very short space of time.  What’s the secret and can it be replicated elsewhere?

I myself and the NTU management – including Chief of Staff and Vice President Professor Lam Khin Yong and Deputy President and Provost Professor Freddy Boey – are invited to talk about this a lot, especially in Europe. I emphasise that I’m not a magician; I don’t have a secret formula. But crucially we’ve been bold and had strong governmental support. Remember, I’ve been head of the European Science Foundation in Strasbourg and I’ve heard countless education and science ministers from across Europe say: ‘we need to invest in the knowledge society to make Europe competitive’. In the most part, it’s all talk. In Singapore the politicians say the same thing, but they also walk the talk.

In addition, the NTU board of trustees has dared to makes changes. We were given the freedom to reorganise the University and recruit a lot of new professors, from Singapore and worldwide. Many people were attracted here because of our vision. It’s not those people who didn’t make it in Europe, but top people – Fellows of the Royal Society, members of the National Academy of Science in the US, Members of the Royal Academy of Science in Sweden. 

Now we’re number one among the young universities in the world, those under 50 years of age, having just surpassed The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). NTU was inaugurated in 1991 and people are most impressed by how fast this has gone. Singapore tends to do things fast of course, but to do it in academia is not so easy.

One thing I’m particularly proud of is that we are also one of the leading Asian Universities in terms of industrial collaboration and at the same time in citation impact. The point is you can do basic research and you can do applied research at the same time, it’s not either or – it’s both. That’s the spirit of both our institutions, Imperial and NTU – we are soul mates in that respect. The late Lord George Porter, former President of the Royal Society and Imperial academic once told me: ‘Bertil, there are two types of research, applied research and not yet applied research’.

You spearheaded NTU’s campus master plan to encourage cross discipline interactions, and Imperial is doing a similar thing with Imperial West. Does collaboration need to be built into the very infrastructure of an institution?

Absolutely, down to the level of drinking coffee together! You have to remember we don’t have to go far back in time to when universities were built in silos – it was the physics building, the biology building, engineering building etc. The knowledge society now demands inter-disciplinary solutions. That's really not easy. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done, it just means you have to be very determined.

In Singapore we had a unique opportunity so it could be incorporated at the level of the infrastructure. But there are examples here too, such as the Francis Crick Institute [of which Imperial is a founding partner]. That is certainly one way to do it. I once visited the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, which is one of the most successful institutes in Europe, with 13 in-house scientists sharing nine Nobel Prizes. I asked the Director (and Nobel Laureate) Sir Aaron Klug, why are you so successful? I expected a long academic answer, but he simply replied ‘we have a common canteen and everyone goes there’.  

Last year NTU launched the joint Future Mobility Research Lab with BMW while this year The Imperial College - Huawei Data Science Innovation Laboratory was announced. What are the benefits of such close collaboration?

Well, you can of course have collaboration at a distance on certain projects, but there are merits in having a close physical interaction as well, not least for the students. They have access to real life work, it’s not just theoretical. It’s not only glamorous cars. It’s also technology behind the façade of the car.

LKCMedicine, a joint medical school between NTU and Imperial, welcomed its second cohort of students this August; you must look back with some pride now that the project is in full swing?

Yes, I’ve been there through what I consider to be three phases. Initially the government asked the question whether we should have a new medical school. I was Provost then and was asked to assess if it could actually be done and how we should do it. An important decision I made at that stage was to involve Imperial as a partner.

The second phase was to plan a new medical school and that was a very important job that was done here at Imperial with the Faculty of Medicine and people like Professors Jenny Higham, Dermot Kelleher and others.

The third phase is to operate a new medical school and we’re into that phase now. I lived through all these three phases. And of course there were ups and downs. One day you were feeling incredibly positive about the project then other days you think this will never happen. You’ve got to realise it involved academic negotiations, talks with healthcare managers, legislative people and politicians. Starting a new mathematics department or humanities department is quite straightforward. But health and medicine is very complex. But so far it’s a success story, we attract absolutely superb students who seem to be getting on wonderfully with the new innovative education programme. Of course one has to be cautious, as we still only have 132 students. When we get to the full 5-year cohort, that will be the acid test.

Can Imperial and NTU still learn from each other?

We are learning everyday on the micro level and of course with NTU still being a new university we have a lot to learn from a super established university like Imperial. I’ve often thought that it’s interesting that it was the old university that came up with a new pedagogy at LKCMedicine, but it’s also interesting that they didn’t do it here in London. They needed a new testing ground. So maybe that’s a new paradigm we’ve established – an experienced university combined with a newer environment where things aren’t locked in. It’s a good combination. So maybe if we, NTU, were to start a new engineering institute, an area where we now have considerable experience, we should go somewhere else entirely, like India for example. That could well be one legacy of LKCMedicine.