The 44th Management Committee (2019)

Tan Kok Choon (President)

Dr Tan Kok Choon is currently the Honorary President of the Operational Research Society of Singapore (ORSS).

Dr Tan is an associate professor of Decision Sciences at NUS Business School and Director (Degree Education) at The Logistics Institute – Asia Pacific (TLIAP), a collaboration between National University of Singapore (NUS) and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech).

He is currently co-director of the MSc (Supply Chain Management) programme at NUS, a cross-faculty professional master’s degree programme jointly offered by Department of Decision Sciences, Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering and TLIAP. Until end 2015, he was also the academic director of the NUS-Georgia Tech Double Master Programme in Logistics & Supply Chain Management.

Prof Tan received a BSc (First Class Honours) in Mathematics from NUS and a PhD in Operations Research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has held appointments as Container Terminal Process Manager at PSA Singapore Terminals, Manager (Operations Research) in Global Technology and Operations Development at PSA International, and Manager of Operations Research at Land Transport Authority.

His research interests include Urban Operations Research, Container Terminal Operations Management, and Logistics Systems Modeling and Analysis. He has published in international journals including Mathematics of Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, OR Spectrum, Intermodal Transportation Research, Supply Chain Optimization, among others.

Prof Tan was a past president of ORSS from April 2003 to March 2006 and has all along been an active member of the ORSS Management Committee. He contributes his service as a member of the Technical Committee for Logistics and the Manufacturing Standards Committee under the Singapore Standards Council.


Ng Kien Ming (Vice-President)

Dr. Ng Kien Ming is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS).

His research interests are in solving operations research problems, such as discrete and nonlinear optimization problems from the industry. The problems also include defence logistics and scheduling problems, and some of them arise from the research projects that he has worked on. His focus is on developing efficient optimization algorithms and techniques to produce good quality or optimal solutions to such problems, including heuristics for solving scheduling problems, smoothing algorithms for solving nonlinear optimization problems with binary variables, and metaheuristics for solving routing problems.

Dr. Ng Kien Ming obtained his B.Sc. degree with First Class Honours in Mathematics from NUS in 1994, and he subsequently obtained an M.S. Degree in Engineering-Economic Systems & Operations Research in 1999 and a Ph.D. degree in Management Science and Engineering (Operations Research) in 2002, both from Stanford University, USA. He has also worked at Systems and Computers Organization and DSO National Laboratories before he went to USA for his graduate degrees. He is currently part of the Management Committee of the Operational Research Society of Singapore and is also the Managing Editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research.


Chen Huaxing (Honorary Secretary)

Mr Chen Huaxing is an analytic leader with diverse set of team management and consulting experiences across multiple domains including quantitative trading, Fintech, payment, gaming, hospitality and logistic supply chain.

He currently serves in wholesale banking of UOB as Head of Data&Analytics, sector solution group. He is also appointed as adjunct faculty in Business School of National University of Singapore. In the past he also served as country CEO of a propriety trading firm where he set up analytics function across AP to transform the traditional trading house with AI.

Prior to that, he spent a few years in gaming and hospitality (Marina Bay Sands) and payment industry (VISA) where he run a team to heavily leverage on big data and advanced analytics to drive for the product/revenue growth and marketing efficiency.

In his earlier career, he has been doing analytic consulting in SAS and SMU, and has completed a few flagship projects with PSA, ST, USS, DBS, MHA. A few projects were highly rated and cited in the medium as IDA Infocomm Award winner.

He has published a few research papers in operational research area, in a few highly ranked journal/conference, one of which won best paper award honorable mention.

Huaxing received a scholarship on year 2000 from Ministry of Education for his EPGY (Education Program for Gifted Youth) from Stanford and a bachelor Degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from NUS. He also obtained a Master of Science Degree in Industry & System Engineering (Operational Research) from NUS, where he won a few rewards as rank 1 graduate of the cohort.


Zhang Meilin(Asst. Honorary Secretary)


Ng Thai Ee(Honorary Treasurer)


Alvin Ong Siau-Wah(Committee Member)

Chief Information Officer for Alexandra Health System, Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, Yishun Community Hospital and Integrated Health Information System (IHIS)

Alvin Ong is the IHIS’ CIO for Alexandra Health System (AHS), the public healthcare group that manages Khoo Teck Puat Hospital and Yishun Community Hospital. As the CIO for Alexandra Health System, he provides healthcare information technology leadership and aligns AHS IT to national healthcare IT strategy. He also oversees the implementation of all IT initiatives for the regional healthcare group.

Alvin has over 20 years’ experience in healthcare-IT spanning major healthcare organizations such as SingHealth and National Healthcare Group. He was involved in the IT planning for new hospitals such as the Yishun Community Hospital (2015), Khoo Teck Puat Hospital (2010) and Changi General Hospital (1996). He is also currently involved in the IT planning for a new medical centre (2017) and a next generation primary care centre (2020).

He held appointments of Adjunct Faculty at SMU, Distinguished Professional at Republic Polytechnic and had served in Engineering Accreditation Board’s accreditation team for engineering degrees at NUS, NTU and SUTD. He was profiled in the 2013 “Who’s Who in Engineering Singapore” by The Institution of Engineers Singapore.

He had chaired or served in the executive committees of organizations and professional associations including National Infocomm Competency Framework (NICF) Steering Committee, IT Standards Committee (ITSC), Service Innovation Design Technical Committee, IT Governance Technical Committee, HCA Hospice IT Committee, IT Management Association (ITMA), Operational Research Society of Singapore (ORSS) and Ideation Edge Asia (IDEA). He was recently elected as the President of IT Management Association (ITMA), a 500-strong association of CIOs and senior IT leaders.

He is also an avid toastmaster and attained the title of Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM) in 2014. He had served as the Division Governor of District 80 Toastmasters International overseeing 26 toastmasters clubs in Singapore and achieved the highest President’s Distinguished Division award in 2015. In 2012, he was recognized as the “Division U Toastmaster of the Year”. He is also a FIDE-rated former national chess player, a certified FIDE chess trainer and a multiple winner of the Public Service Chess Championship since 2002 and consecutively in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Alvin holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Honors) from the National University of Singapore, a MBA from the University of Surrey UK, CITPM(Senior) and COMIT(Senior).


Geoffrey Chua(Committee Member)

Dr. Geoffrey Chua is Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Nanyang Business School (NBS). He teaches operations management, supply chain management, service operations, and management science at the undergraduate, MBA and MSc levels. In 2014, he received the Teaching Excellence Award from NBS and was nominated for Teacher of the Year (NBS). In 2015, he was selected for The Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) award by JCI Philippines and was nominated for the university-wide Nanyang Education Award. Before joining NBS, he was program director for Management Engineering at the Ateneo de Manila University and an operations consultant for the manufacturing and public sectors.

Dr. Chua specializes in (1) flexible capacity, (2) inventory management, (3) operations-marketing interface and (4) humanitarian operations. His research has appeared in leading academic journals such as Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, and Operations Research Letters. He also regularly presents his work at conferences such as INFORMS, POMS, MSOM, IFORS and APORS. He received the Research Excellence Award twice (2015, 2011) from NBS, the Best Theoretical Paper Award (2006) from APORS, and the President Graduate Fellowship twice (2007, 2006) from NUS. He was recently awarded a MOE Tier 2 research grant (2016-2019) to study coordination of humanitarian operations for disaster management in Asia.

In addition to serving on the editorial boards of Production and Operations Management and Computers & Operations Research, he also serves as reviewer for several journals such as Operations Research, Management Science, IIE Transactions, European Journal of Operational Research, Naval Research Logistics, and International Journal of Production Economics. For the ITOM division, he served as research seminar coordinator for operations management from 2011 to 2013, and currently sits in the curriculum committee and the search committee. He is also Fellow of the Renaissance Engineering Programme (REP) and is part of the management committee of the Operational Research Society of Singapore (ORSS).


Melvyn Sim(Committee Member)

Dr. Melvyn Sim is Professor and Provost's Chair at the Department of Analytics & Operations, NUS Business school. His research interests fall broadly under the categories of decision making and optimization under uncertainty with applications ranging from finance, supply chain management, healthcare to engineered systems. He is one of the active proponents of Robust Optimization and has given invited talks in this field at international conferences. Dr. Sim won second places in the 2002 and 2004 George Nicholson best student paper competition and first place in the 2007 Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) best paper competition. He is also the recipient of the 2009 NUS outstanding young researcher award. Dr. Sim serves as an associate editor for Operations Research, Management Science and Mathematical Programming Computations.


Yao Zhishuang(Committee Member)



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