Adrian Kuah

Adrian Kuah has the kind of career trajectory that calls to mind the phrase “short attention span”. It is also the kind of career path that traditional Asian parents wring their hands and lament about. After a series of twists and turns, Adrian is finally in a job that allows and empowers him to ask inconvenient questions, play the agent provocateur, and irritate the heck out of the NUS senior leadership.

Dr Adrian Kuah is the founding director of the Futures Office, National University of Singapore, an internal foresight think-tank tasked to ask fundamental, first-order questions and uncover hidden assumptions to draw insights about possible and plausible futures of higher education. Just prior to that, from 2015 to 2018, he was Senior Research Fellow and Head, Case Studies Unit at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. His research interests included futures thinking, education and public policy, and complexity science.

Adrian started his career in the civil service first as a foreign service officer with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then as an economist in the Monetary Authority of Singapore. He subsequently left for the private sector as a business strategy consultant before embarking on an academic career with the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. As Assistant Professor on its Military Studies programme, he taught on the MSc programmes as well as the Goh Keng Swee Command and Staff College’s professional military education courses.

Undeterred and failing to learn from his first time around, he returned to the civil service for a second stint in 2013 as Lead Strategist in the Centre for Strategic Futures, Strategic Policy Office, Prime Minister’s Office, where he was involved in whole-of-Government futures research and scenario planning. He led a team of researchers in analysing complex, cross-cutting public policy issues across the social, economic, infrastructure and security domains. He also conducted training on futures thinking and complexity science for the Singapore Public Service at the Civil Service College.

On the strategic foresight and scenario planning front, Adrian has conducted numerous training workshops for students at the School, as well as for civil servants from a variety of government agencies. Such agencies include the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, among others. Externally, Adrian has also conducted training on scenario planning for the governments of Oman, Thailand, as well as the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG). In June 2018, he was asked by the President of NUS to conceptualise and set up the NUS Futures Office.

Adrian obtained his Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in Economics and Politics from the University of York, graduating with first class honours, followed by his Master of Arts degree in International Politics from the University of Warwick. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Defence Policy and Economics from Cranfield University, where his doctoral studies were fully funded by RSIS.