Susan Lim

Dr Susan Lim is an accomplished surgeon from Singapore known for her contributions that have taken their place in medical history, and for pioneering new surgical technologies. She has a wide range of interests in surgery, in particular advanced laparoscopic and robotic surgery and its applications in hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery, as well as breast cancer.

The Singapore Business Times honoured Dr Lim with the ‘Spirit of the Century’ award after the public voted her as a 21st century role model. She is the current co-chair of the Global Advisory Council of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), and gave an inspirational talk on TED Talks called ‘Transplant Cells, Not Organs’. The talk was made available under the category of ‘inspiring’ on the TED website.

Education And Scholarships

During this period as a postgraduate student at Cambridge, she published extensively, and received numerous travel awards including the Sandoz Travel Award to attend and present at the Transplantation Congress in Washington D.C., U.S.A. in 1987, the Wellcome Trust Travel Award, the British Society of Immunology Travel Award and the British Transplantation Society Travel Award to attend and present at the Transplantation Society Meeting in Sydney, 1988, International Transplantation Society Travel Award to attend and present at the Transplantation Society Meeting, San Francisco, August 1990.

With the Ethicon Foundation Travel Award, Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, 1988, and the Royal College of Surgeons of Glasgow Traveling Fellowship, 1988, Dr Susan Lim was provided the opportunity to travel to Minneapolis to observe and study Pancreatic and Islet Cell Transplantation under Professors John Najarian and David Sutherland, and to observe the historic pioneering series of living related pancreas transplants performed at that time.

Dr Lim was awarded the Colombo Plan Scholarship in Medicine at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She graduated in 1979 with first class honours and was presented with the David Rosenthal Memorial Prize when she achieved the highest aggregate marks during her preclinical years.

She then went on to top the postgraduate surgical exams at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and was awarded the GB Ong Gold Medal for being the most distinguished candidate in General Surgery (shared) in 1984.

After completing her postgraduate degrees in surgery, she received a Churchill College Scholarship, the Gulbenkian Award to pursue a PhD at the University of Cambridge in the UK.

Dr Lim’s thesis was in the area of transplantation immunology, and during this time was awarded further scholarships, including the Overseas Research Student Merit Award, and the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Overseas Student Bursaries U.K for the years 1985-1988.

Fellowships And Educational Awards

Dr Lim obtained various fellowships at the Surgical Colleges including the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, the Masters of Medicine (Surgery) in Singapore, the American College of Surgeons and Trinity College at the University of Melbourne (where she made history as the youngest person to be made a Fellow of the College). In 2006, Dr Lim was given the award of Distinguished Alumnus by Monash University in Australia, and in 2007, the University of Newcastle in Australia awarded her with an Honorary Degree as Doctor of Medicine (honoris causa). Between 2013 and 2015 she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley in the USA.