Hi! I’m Nym, presently a master’s student at SUTD’s Urban Science programme. As a first-gen student who started out in a factory, I was fortunate to receive a liberal education at Yale-NUS and Amherst, the top liberal arts colleges of the East & West, where I majored in Philosophy, Politics, & Economics.

My research interests are in emerging sociological ideas on rethinking work, careers, & corporations in the Anthropocene (especially relating to opportunity & sustainability), as well as community & urban sociology. I’ve co-published climate policy research in Nature Climate Change, the world’s top environmental science journal. My BA thesis on representing marginalized communities won the “junior Nobel Prize” in political science. I also attended the global graduate-level 2021 Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science as an undergraduate. I’m presently researching the future of work and careers in Singapore at the LKYCIC, and will investigate local hybrid community organizations for my Master’s thesis.

Beyond academia, my policy ideas have clinched global prizes from the New York Times, ASEAN, and NUS, addressing diverse issues from socioeconomic mobility to gender empowerment. I once presented an educational inequality policy proposal to Singapore’s Education Minister, interviewed 7 Members of Parliament on their representative behaviour, as well as Taipei’s mayor & the Chief Smart City Officers of 4 ASEAN cities on their urban liveability innovations. I was an inaugural Arete Fellow at Effective Altruism Singapore and a 2018 Yale-NUS Travel Fellow, where I explored spiritual institutions and a life well lived around Western China & Tibet.

Fascinated by how novel institutions can address our era’s inequities, I’ve found joy building multidimensional communities as the founding Co-President of Humanism.Yale-NUS, inaugural Vice-President (Policy) of the Roosevelt Institute@Yale-NUS, inaugural Chair of the In-Betweeners (First-Gen/​Low-Income) Collective at Yale-NUS, and founding member of Protege Ventures—respectively Singapore’s first student-run secular spirituality society, public policy think-tank, socioeconomic identity collective, and venture capital fund. The sky’s the limit, literally—I also pioneered stargazing initiatives as President of Ashen Light: Yale-NUS Astronomy.

Otherwise, I explore worlds via humanistic science fiction, realism & transcendental literature.