New Dean appointed for Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School
By Satish Cheney, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 02 July 2008 2100 hrs

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SINGAPORE : A new Dean has been appointed for the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School. Hailing from Chennai, India, Dr Ranga Krishnan succeeds Dr Sanders Williams.

Dr Williams will now turn his attention to his role as Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Duke.

Duke-NUS welcomed its inaugural class of 26 graduate students in August 2007 and will welcome its second class in August 2008.

Dr Krishnan believes that within one to two years, Duke-NUS will offer an MD/PhD programme, as well as a research PhD programme.

He said, "This is a rare opportunity to help establish a legacy of excellence and progressive medical education in the new era of technology. Methods of teaching and learning are very different today than they ever have been before.

"And building a modern medical education system that, from the start, includes all of the new tools, technologies and strategies, can be a model that other medical schools might be able to learn from."

Dr Krishnan is an internationally-renowned expert in treating depression and other brain disorders of the elderly.

He has written four books, more than 50 textbook chapters and more than 380 journal articles on the subjects of elderly depression, dementia, Alzheimer's disease, panic disorder, bipolar disorder in late life and obsessive-compulsive disorder, among others.

In the late 1990s, he identified and described the pathology of a then little-known condition called vascular depression in which small strokes in the mood centres of the brain give rise to a unique type of depression. - CNA/ms