1 Jan 2024

Surgeon Innovator: "I love mentoring others to juggle medicine and innovation"

Dr Rena Dharmawan (Duke-NUS ’11) who received the NUS Alumni Awards for Outstanding Young Alumni in 2023, derived great joy during the year from seeing innovators and entrepreneurs emerge from a “Shark Tank”-style programme she started.

Similar to Shark Tank – a television series where wannabe-entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to get funding and support for their inventions – a winning team which includes Duke-NUS medical students, NUS Biomedical Engineering and NUS MBA Business students walked away with $20,000 for a new prototype to prevent perinatal tears during childbirth.

The “Dazzle Day” event in April 2023 was the inaugural run of the Duke-NUS Health Innovator Programme (D-HIP), the brainchild of Dr Rena Dharmawan. D-HIP places medical students with mentors, engineering and business students in multidisciplinary teams where they undergo a nine-month innovation fellowship.

While a surgeon specialising in benign and malignant conditions of the thyroid and parathyroid gland, the consultant surgeon at the National Cancer Centre has blazed a trail of innovation in clinical healthcare as well as medical education.

The Assistant Dean and Assistant Professor at Duke-NUS has been involved in launching three medical start-ups and has two patents under her belt. The mother of two has also been an alumna mentor at Duke-NUS as far back as 2011, advising students on how to manage work and life, while pursuing their dreams in innovation.

What was your biggest highlight for 2023?

That would be the graduation of the first batch of D-HIP fellows from the Duke NUS Medical school, NUS Biomedical Engineering and NUS Business School in April 2023 during Dazzle Day. It was a very proud moment for myself and our team as it was the first batch of fellows!

Was it challenging in any way?

Because we are creating multi-disciplinary teams, every stakeholder we bring in to the programme – medical school, engineering school, business school, company/industry mentor, clinician mentor, hospital sponsor – brings additional layers of complexity and it isn’t easy managing everyone’s expectations. But it also true that when you bring diverse group of people who would not have normally met to work on a project, magic can happen.

What are you most grateful for?

Time with family and closed ones. A family member was unfortunately diagnosed with a medical condition this year, and it was truly a wakeup call for all of us in our family to spend more meaningful time together. I went on a family holiday in December and it was the first time in a long time where our family of four generations got together in one place to hang out and spend time together, and I am grateful we got to do that. 

As a working mom, a holiday is also the only time I get to be with my daughter and son, who are aged 9 and 7, 24/7. I truly believe in this saying that “in the carousel of life, family is the music that make the ride worthwhile.”

What did you learn about yourself this year?

Giving is more rewarding than taking. At work it’s about mentoring the next generation of innovators through small ways like D-HIP and even taking time off my schedule to meet young medical students and residents for coffee or drinks to understand their passion and help them navigate their career.

What excites you about 2024?

I will keep going at what I am doing at Duke NUS and D-HIP till we reach our vision to be the leader in healthcare innovation education and training, to train the next generation of healthcare innovators in Singapore and the region.