Healthcare and Science thomsonreuters.com

My research is in tissues of the skin and scar formation, trying to understand why a scar forms after a wounding.  Our aim is to develop new treatments to care for skin and wounds and, ultimately, new solutions to prevent the formation of scars.

My university education was in Vietnam and I possessed a strong interest in healing wounds from the earliest days of my medical and scientific career. I worked for four years at the National Institute of Burns treating major burns victims and Vietnam War veterans, both military and civilian.

I then won a scholarship to Oxford, working at the Wound Healing Institute and Department of Dermatology, collaborating with experts in the field and really developed my own knowledge there.

In 1998, Dr Ivor Lim and I established the Wound Healing and Stem Cell Research Group (previously the Skin Cell Research Group) focusing on skin and keloid scar biology. The group is recognized today as one of the world leading groups in keloid and scar biology research.

In my current position at the National University of Singapore, I have two areas of focus: one is skin and scar healing and the other is stem cells. I discovered a new source of stem cells from the umbilical cord lining membrane which is very useful for tissue repair and regeneration. I am working very hard on this project - collaborating with colleagues overseas in the UK, US, Japan, Korea and so on. I'm also a co-founder and share holder of two Singapore-based biotech start-up companies: CellResearch Corporation Pte Ltd and CordLabs Pte Ltd. These companies were formed to commercialize cell research, scar, skin wound healing, as well as stem cell research and development.

My day is not predictable. Sometimes I am doing work in the lab with my masters students, sometimes I am doing testing, like today for example where I've just come back from doing some tissue grafting. I also travel overseas for conferences to talk to the other scientists in the academic institutions and companies too, as well as the work I do with my start-up companies in Singapore.

I use Thomson Reuters quite often. Web of Knowledge is now on our library website so we can research into the Impact Factor of journals. I also use it for performance evaluation. We need to use this system to appraise citations to our papers and see how well we are doing. I think it's a very useful system - especially as all the main universities around the world use it also. I have also registered with ResearcherID.