Benjamin Tee

Benjamin Tee is currently President’s Assistant Professor at National University of Singapore (NUS), where he leads the Sensor.AI Systems Labs.

He obtained his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2013 and applied a needs-driven R&D approach as a Stanford Biodesign Global Innovation Fellow in 2014. He was awarded the prestigious NRF Fellowship in 2017.

He has created several new platform technologies for large area tactile sensing for robotics, medical devices and prosthetics applications. His work included designing microstructures to enhance mechanical sensitivity of thin elastic films for use in flexible pressure sensors. In addition, he has also help create highly stretchable yet transparent electrodes for sensing applications. Furthermore, he also created the world’s first repeatably self-healing electronic sensor skin technology. More recently, he developed artifical mechanoreceptors that mimic the digital output of biological mechanoreceptors for potential use in neural prosthetic devices. These works are in several highly cited research papers on electronic sensor skins and wearable technologies in major journals such as Science, Nature Materials and Nature Nanotechnology. He has filed over 10 patents, with several being licensed.

Dr. Tee has also won numerous international awards that recognized his work, including the prestigious WEF Young Scientist of the Year 2019, MIT TR35 Innovators Under 35 Award, MRS Graduate Student Award (Gold) and TSMC Outstanding Student Research Gold and Academy award. He was also the sole winner of the Singapore Young Scientist Award in 2016, selected by the Singapore National Academy of Sciences.

He believes in a multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach to identifying and tackling grand research challenges. He also strives to achieve translational real-world impact through entrepreneurial endeavours, and has experience co-founding Privi Medical (with FDA cleared product), to create technologies for unmet clinical needs.

He obtained an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering (EE) from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (class of ’03) and a Masters (EE) from Stanford (class of ’06). He is grateful to the people of Singapore for his knowledge acquisition journey.

He serves on the IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) Flexible Electronics and Displays committee and the Materials Research Society Singapore Committee.

He was featured by CNN International as one of their Tomorrow’s Hero series and by Channel News Asia International in the ASEAN’s Next Generation Leaders documentary series.

Companies

• President's Assistant Professor National University of Singapore (2017)
• Co-founder Privi Medical (2014)
• Biodesign Global Fellow (Singapore-Stanford) Stanford University (2014)
• Hardware Engineering Intern Amazon Lab126 (2013 — 2013)
• Ph.D Candidate Stanford University (2008 — 2013)
• Design Thinking bootcamp graduate Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (2012 — 2012)
• Research and Development Intern Synaptics (2012 — 2012)
• Creating a Startup (S356) Stanford Graduate School of Business (2011 — 2011)
• Business Management for Scientists and Engineers Stanford University (2011 — 2011)

Education

• M.S. Stanford University (2006 — 2007)
• B.S.E University of Michigan (2003 — 2006)