Professor Wong Lim Soon next to a display on his achievements

SoC Professor Wong Lim Soon has been conferred the Singapore Youth Awards (SYA) Medal of Commendation 2006. He received the medal from Minister for Defence Teo Chee Hean at a ceremony on 2 July 2006. The medal is recognition that Professor Wong has continued to make significant achievements and contributions in the intervening years since he was conferred the Singapore Youth Award for Science and Technology in 1999. He received the award in 1999 for his international contributions to database theories and the development of the Kleisli query system, which also won him the Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors’ Gold Award. Since then, he has continued to excel in bioinformatics where he discovered novel data mining methods. His ground-breaking development of a system that enables doctors to diagnose and better treat acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in young patients won him an Asian Innovation Gold Award by the Far Eastern Economic Review in 2003. In the same year, he co-founded the Association of Asian Societies for Bioinformatics (AASBi) in Tokyo, in collaboration with the bioinformatics societies in Australia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Professor Wong also produced one of the most accurate prediction systems for identifying protein translation initiation sites in genomic DNA and co-developed one of the first solutions to extract protein-/gene-interaction information from literature.

In 2004, he was ranked 40th “best nurturer” of computer science research by the Indian Institute of Science in a technical study
based on more than 50,000 computer science researchers.

In 2005, Professor Wong was conferred a full professorship by the National University of Singapore, 11 years after obtaining his PhD.

Professor Wong’s passion has inspired many – students, teachers, parents and businessmen – to pursue their interest and research in bioinformatics, biocomputing and genome informatics.

Internationally, Professor Wong has also been invited to share his knowledge and research findings as keynote speaker at numerous symposiums and workshops.