Singapore, 7 February 2020 (Friday) – The Singapore Management University’s (SMU) School of Information Systems (SIS) has launched a new Professional Doctoral Degree, Doctor of Engineering (EngD), to train professionals to perform deep technical industrial research and translate the outputs into innovative products and services. It also aims to prepare students to become IT leaders with deep technical expertise for innovating, designing and managing complex IT systems.

Recommended as a four-year course of part-time study, with a maximum candidature period of seven years, the SMU EngD programme will train information and communications technology (ICT) professionals with deeper technical skills to conduct industry-focused R&D. It will offer them the opportunity to conduct practice research with SMU faculty in SIS’s core research areas and draw on the work of SIS’s research labs and institutions to conduct meaningful work of value and impact to their companies whilst enhancing their skills, experience and employability.

There is a high demand in the burgeoning tech industry in Singapore and South East Asia for talents with deep technical skills in areas such as Data Science & Engineering, Cybersecurity, AI, Intelligent Systems & Optimization, Software & Cyber-Physical Systems and other areas. The SMU EngD serves to address this acute manpower shortage by developing relevant deep technical skills among participating professionals.

SMU SIS is unique in terms of having 60% of its faculty being research oriented with the remaining 40% being teaching focussed, many of whom come with years of industry experience. The coupling of strong research together with practice capabilities bring out the best in terms of supervising SMU EngD students.

Associate Dean, SIS Post-Graduate Professional Education, Professor of Information Systems (Education) Michelle Cheong explained, “SIS has various industry-oriented applied research labs where our experienced faculty is able to guide high-calibre candidates in carrying out innovative practice research. Areas of research include artificial intelligence and data science, cyber-physical systems and information systems, as well as multi-disciplinary research involving other SMU schools. The dissertation project, sponsored by the candidate‘s company, will be rich in both technical and business domain complexities, so as to generate meaningful and high quality research outputs.

Associate Professor of Information Systems (Practice) and Academic Director, SMU-TCS iCity Lab Tan Hwee Pink commented, “The SIS EngD Programme advocates translational research which presents a lens to understand real-world needs and network of cross-disciplinary domain experts. This provides EngD students training opportunities to testbed and validate their ideas with real users and domain experts, thus making them more industry-relevant. We are confident that technology firms will welcome the addition of the new SMU EngD to help with their hiring needs.”

Professionals with at least three years of relevant work experience in the selected business domains, who are committed to applying deep knowledge and technical skills in practice research to solve complex company-sponsored projects are invited to apply for the EngD programme, which will induct its first students in August 2020.

For further information about the programme, please refer to the following: www.sis.smu.edu.sg/engd