Dr Susan Lim Cambridge Bursary

This award is up to £2,000 each year and will be offered annually for up to four years to undergraduates studying at Churchill College.

If you apply for a Cambridge Bursary and are a medical or STEM student, you will be considered for a Lim Bursary.

The bursary will be offered on a means-tested basis, within the framework provided by the Cambridge Bursary Scheme for undergraduates studying medicine, sciences, computer science, engineering, or mathematics, for the duration of their course. The key criteria for the award are financial need and satisfactory academic endeavour. The Bursary is open to UK and international students, and the bursaries are awarded for four years subject to satisfactory academic performance.

Undergraduate award-holders are asked to provide an annual report to the Tutorial Office which will send it to Dr Susan Lim and Deepak Sharma, no later than six months after the end of each academic year.

Recipients of these bursaries are encouraged by the College to join a virtual community of “Slim Scholars” and to upload information about themselves on the Foundation website, through the Web Administrator.

Susan Lim is an alumna of Churchill. She completed her PhD at the College in 1988, having completed her medical degree at Monash University in Australia.

About Susan Lim

Dr Susan Lim is the current Co-chair of the Global Advisory Council of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), which, with a membership of over 4000 across 60 countries, is the largest global body of stem cell scientists.

Susan’s historic performance of the first successful cadaveric liver transplant for Singapore in 1990 propelled her into the media spotlight at the age of 35. She broke through the gender glass ceiling in transplantation surgery and became the first in Asia, and the second woman in the world to have performed a successful liver transplant at that time.
Following an early education in Singapore, she was awarded the Colombo Plan scholarship to study medicine at Monash University, Australia (1974-1979), and the Gulbenkian Scholarship, Churchill College to undertake a PhD in transplantation immunology at the University of Cambridge UK (1985-1988). She was awarded the GB Ong Gold medal (shared) for topping the surgical exams at the Royal College of Surgeons (Edinburgh) in 1984.

Her entrepreneurial work in surgery earned her the Business Times of Singapore “Spirit of the Century” Award, conferred upon her by the Singapore public in a national contest to identify a role model for the 21st century.

Her academic recognitions include being the youngest academic to be elected Fellow of Trinity College (2005), University of Melbourne, Australia, the Monash University Distinguished Alumnus Award (2006), and an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Medicine (honoris causa) by The University of Newcastle, Australia (2007).

In 2007, the Committee for Review & Recognition (CRR) named the American Academy of Continuing Medical Education (AACME) 28th award, the “Dr Susan Lim Award” for the advancement in Laparoscopic & Minimally Invasive Surgery. She pioneered the Da Vinci Robotic General Surgery Program in Singapore in 2004, held the position of Robotic Medical Director for Asia for Computer Motion Industries in 2003, and was appointed Chairman of Parkway Hospitals Centre for Robotic Surgery for Training and Development in 2005.

Over her 30 year academic and surgical career, she has focused on pioneering the new areas in medicine, which have included transplantation and stem cell research, which she describes in her 2011 TED talk “Transplant Cells not Organs”, which she describes in her 2016 TEDx Berkeley Talk “The Dawn of a New Ecosystem in Organ Replacement”.

For her humanitarian work, she was recognized in the Australian House of Parliament (House of Representatives Official Hansard no. 17, 2005) for attending to, and saving the lives of Australian victims of the second Bali bomb blast.

Dr Susan Lim and her husband founded the Indiapore Trust in 2000 to educate underprivileged children in Asia with a focus in the area of information technology. In 2010, the Dr Susan Lim Medical Scholarship was established to assist well-deserving students pursue a medical education at Trinity College, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Susan’s wide–ranging interests include skiing, swimming and a huge love for the outdoors. Her desire to discover that next big thing keeps her actively focused on robotics and stem cell research. She is a co-founder of 91 Springboard, a start up growth hub headquartered in Delhi, India.

She strongly believes that as society increasingly embraces technology, communication and interactions will extend beyond humans to robots and other inanimates.