The Journey From Chemor to Tokyo & Oxford
Look East & Japanese Academic Rigor
My voyage into electronic engineering started in Chemor, Perak, fueled by an early curiosity to see how minuscule electric currents could instruct massive industrial assemblies. Under Malaysia’s Look East Policy, I graduated with my B.Eng. from The University of Tokyo (1998) and later earned my M.Eng. and Ph.D. at Gifu University under the Monbukagakusho Scholarship, receiving the IEICE Student Research Award.
Seven Years in Semiconductor Cleanrooms
Before stepping into full-time academia, I worked across frontline semiconductor manufacturing: Design Engineer at Hitachi Ltd. (Tochigi, Japan), Test Engineer at Unisem (M) Berhad, Senior R&D Engineer at STATS ChipPAC, and Academic Researcher at MIMOS Berhad. Those years instilled an uncompromising discipline: an engineering concept is only valid when it survives real-world tolerances.
UKM Tenure & University of Oxford
Joining Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) in March 2008, I expanded into healthcare technology through a two-year postdoctoral fellowship (2014–2016) at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME), University of Oxford, and Kellogg College. There, we architected photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal pipelines deployed in clinical trials across Malawi and South Africa.