The Straits Times Global Outlook 2019

Professor Danny Quah
Dean and Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore

Danny Quah is Dean and Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS.  His current research takes an economic approach to world order, studying the supply and demand of world order: on the one hand, what international system the world’s superpowers provide, and on the other, what world order the global community needs.

Quah uses this to recast analysis of global power shifts, the rise of the east, regional order, and models of global power relations.

Quah is a member of the Spence-Stiglitz Commission on Global Economic Transformation. He is the author of “The Global Economy’s Shifting Centre of Gravity”.  Quah gave the third LSE-NUS lecture in 2013, and TEDx talks in 2016, 2014, and 2012.  Quah was previously Assistant Professor of Economics at MIT, and then Professor of Economics and International Development, and Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre at LSE.  He had also served as LSE’s Head of Department for Economics, and Council Member on Malaysia’s National Economic Advisory Council. 

Quah studied at Princeton, Minnesota, and Harvard.

Ms Selena Ling 
Head of Treasury Research & Strategy and Member of OCBC Wealth Panel, OCBC Bank

Selena Ling is the chief economist for OCBC Bank. As Head of Treasury Research & Strategy, she leads a research team that is responsible for Treasury market research, forecasts and trading recommendations for the bank, covering fixed income, interest rates, corporate credit, foreign exchange and macroeconomic commentary.

She is a member of the OCBC Wealth Panel for Singapore and Malaysia, as well as a council member for the Economic Society of Singapore.  She was conferred the Institute of Banking & Finance Fellow Award in Financial Markets in 2017. The IBF Fellow award recognises industry veterans who have demonstrated mastery of a profession and exemplify thought leadership and commitment to industry development.  Her research writings has been extensively quoted and published by prominent media across print, television and radio. OCBC also participates in regular economic polls by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Focus Economics, ConsensusForecast, Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, among others.

Under her leadership, OCBC Bank’s research capabilities have been greatly valued by customers and highly ranked in surveys for interest rate research, FX research, market coverage and Asian macroeconomic research in various forums, including Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and AsiaMoney Fixed Income and FX polls, among others.  

Prior to joining OCBC in August 2000, Selena was with the Fiscal Policy Unit under the Ministry of Finance (MOF) and the Economics Department in the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI). She received her Bachelor of Science (Economics) from the London School of Economics and her Masters in Applied Economics from the National University of Singapore.

Mr Vikram Khanna
Associate Editor, The Straits Times 

Vikram Khanna is Associate Editor of The Straits Times as well as a columnist on Economic Affairs. He was previously Associate Editor of The Business Times  Prior to joining SPH in 1993, he was an economist at the IMF in Washington, DC.  He has B.A., M.A. and M.Phil degrees in Economics from the University of Cambridge, UK

He is Vice President of the Economic Society of Singapore.
 

Ms Goh Sui Noi
East Asia Editor 

Goh Sui Noi is East Asia Editor at The Straits Times. She was previously the paper’s China Bureau Chief in Beijing from 2016 to 2018. She spent three years in Taipei (1999-2002) and nearly three years in Beijing (2002-2005) as foreign correspondent before returning to the Singapore office of the newspaper. She worked in various roles - as senior writer, copy editor and East Asia editor - before returning to Beijing as bureau chief in 2016.



Assistant Professor Winston Chow
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Winston Chow investigates how cities affect weather and climate, and how weather and climate affects cities. He obtained a Ph.D. in Geography from Arizona State University, and three degrees from the National University of Singapore (NUS). Presently, he is an Assistant Professor at NUS Geography, and concurrently holds an adjunct position at the Institute of Water Policy at NUS’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. In 2018, he was invited by the United Nations-commissioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to be a Lead Author for the chapter on “Cities, Settlements and Key Infrastructure” their forthcoming Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change published in 2021. Sporadically, he tweets on climate change and other interesting curiosities @winstontlchow.



Assistant Professor Lynette Cheah
Assistant Professor, Engineering Ssytems and Design, Singapore University of Technology and Design

Modern-day transportation is heavily dependent on petroleum, which presents challenging energy and environmental problems. Lynette is passionate about achieving sustainable mobility, and her research has focused on developing models and tools to assess the life-cycle energy and environmental impacts of road transport.

Prior to joining SUTD, Lynette was a research scientist with the Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences, part of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore. She was also a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Materials Systems Laboratory at MIT, and a research assistant at the Sloan Automotive Laboratory at MIT. She is a Singapore National Science Scholar and a Fellow with the Martin Family Society for Sustainability. Lynette holds a B.S. in civil and environmental engineering from Northwestern University, an M.S. in management science from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in engineering systems from MIT.



Mr David Fogarty
Assistant Foreign Editor, The Straits Times

David Fogarty joined The Straits Times as an Assistant Foreign Editor in 2014. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting on The Canberra Times in 1988 after finishing his science degree. David started writing science news stories in 1986, including the relatively new area of climate change and this caught the attention of the editor of The Canberra Times. In 1990, he went to work in London and then Hong Kong. In 1997, he moved to Singapore with Reuters. He spent 19 years with Reuters as a senior subeditor on the Asia Desk and then as the wire agency's only Climate Change Correspondent from 2008-12. After Reuters, he did media consulting for a group of US foundations.  

 

Professor Joseph Chinyong Liow
Dean, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Dean S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University

Joseph Chinyong Liow is Dean of College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and concurrently, Dean of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he is also Professor of Comparative and International Politics. He held the inaugural Lee Kuan Yew Chair in Southeast Asia Studies at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC, where he was also a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program. Joseph’s research interests encompass Muslim politics and social movements in Southeast Asia and the geopolitics and geoeconomics of the Asia-Pacific region. Joseph is the author, co-author, or editor of 14 books. His most recent single-authored books are Ambivalent Engagement: The United States and Regional Security in Southeast Asia after the Cold War (Brookings 2017), Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Southeast Asia, fourth edition (Routledge, 2014). A regular columnist for the Straits Times, his commentaries on international affairs have also appeared in New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Interest, Nikkei Asian Review, and the Wall Street Journal.  He has testified to the United States Congress, and been invited to deliver a special closed door briefing to the ASEAN Defence Minister’s Meeting.  In addition to scholarship and policy analysis, Joseph has also consulted for a wide range of MNCs including Shell, BHP Billiton, Chevron, Japan Bank for International Cooperation, Total, and Statoil. He sits on the board of several peer-reviewed academic and policy journals and the expert panel of the Social Science Research Council (Singapore), and is Singapore’s representative on the advisory board of the ASEAN Institute of Peace and Reconciliation formed under the auspices of the ASEAN Charter.

Joseph Liow holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MSc in Strategic Studies from the Nanyang Technological University, and a BA (Hons) in Political Science from the University of Madison-Wisconsin.


Dr Norshahril Saat
Fellow, Iseas – Yusof Ishak Institute

Dr Norshahril Saat is a Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. In June 2015, he was awarded a PhD in International, Political and Strategic Studies by the Australian National University (ANU). In 2018, he published The State, Ulama, and Islam in Malaysia and Indonesia (Amsterdam University Press); Tradition and Islamic Learning: Singapore Students in the Al-Azhar University (ISEAS Publishing); and edited Islam in Southeast Asia: Negotiating Modernity (ISEAS Publishing) and Fulfilling the Trust”50 years of shaping Muslim religious life in Singapore (World Scientific Press and MUIS).