Assoc. Prof. Agnes Xue

A Red-Dot and A’Prime Design award-winner and the first Industrial Designer in Singapore to be awarded the Doctoral of Philosophy (PhD) qualification from the National University of Singapore (NUS), Dr Agnes Xue received the NUS President’s Graduate Fellowship and was a NUS Research Scholar, investigating on better approaches in the design of self-care devices and applications for women’s health. She is currently an Associate Professor, Co-Chair of the Design and Specialised Businesses Cluster Applied Research Committee, and Programme Director of the Design programmes at the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT). Her research interest has always been exploring better designs for healthcare that will have user-centric impact in this digital age. Her professional and teaching experience include work at Siemens Medical Instruments, the Design Singapore Council and NUS. She was previously the Curriculum Head at Singapore Stanford Biodesign programme A*STAR-EDB and has trained over 400 budding medical device innovators. As a published scientific author and educator, Agnes is a frequent speaker at local and international conferences and an experienced grant reviewer. Agnes is a strong believer in involving students in industry-based applied-research projects through practicum placements, capstone projects and as student assistants.

At SIT, Agnes continues to stay ahead of this curve by building collaborative learning experiences into the curriculum. These experiences are constructed not only within the confines of the classroom, but are increasingly interdisciplinary, pairing design students with students from other majors across campus. Hence in order to do this, she steps forward to conduct a lot of cross-cluster or inter-cluster teaching and project work whenever possible. She has been running conventional studios but have also introduced diverse collaborative experiences to support student learning on several levels. Being a cross-disciplinary educator who teaches across design, engineering, and health sciences programmes, she has made students explore and discover that would have been unavailable to single disciplines in an isolated classroom setting. She continues to create this sort of multi-disciplinary opportunities where students could use their knowledge and different skillsets to contribute their own innovative ideas to technology-development challenges SIT, as an applied learning university is here to address.