Think Pieces

Activities / News

The Impact of Covid-19 on Malaysia’s Absolute Poverty Rate

As we kick off the month that saw Malaya gaining its independence 64 years ago, the release of Malaysia’s Voluntary National Review (VNR) report for 2021 is timely. The report, which is released once in four years, documents our progress in meeting sustainable development goals (SDG). For the 2021…

New Heroes of Higher Education: The Digital Lecturers

Over the past year, owing to the Covid19 pandemic, most universities have been forced to make a major shift in they way they teach their students, moving to online teaching or using a combination of online and face-to-face teaching and learning. The trend towards this was already underway well…

Sunway’s X Factor in Winning Competitions

Sunway University students swept the awards at the Hanzi-Bank of China Ang Pow Design Competition 2020. Four Sunway students beat more than 200 entries from students across the country to take home the top prizes. Design students at Sunway University have been constantly exposed to the latest…

Microbiomics: The Orang Asli Healthy Diet

The Orang Asli – the indigenous people of Peninsula Malaysia, still uphold their traditional lifestyle, including food preparation methods and consumption habits.

Amplifying Our Strengths Using Technology

Early last month, Chief Statistician Datuk Seri Dr Mohd Uzir Mahidin was quoted as saying that the labour market condition could face another challenging situation in upcoming months.

Nuclear Physics and Perseverance: Detective Tales from Mars

A key instrument on the Perseverance Rover is PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry), a microfocus X-ray fluorescence instrument that can analyze the elemental chemistry. Customised polycapillary X-ray focusing optics applied to an X-ray beam (from a rhodium anode, grounded-cathode…

Education: An Equaliser

While many education systems turned to alternative delivery modes, with online learning growing in popularity, it is estimated that remote learning remains out of reach for at least half a billion students across the globe. Even if students were able to return to school, it may come as a surprise…

Malaya Before Merdeka: Mirrored in the Life of H.S. Lee

Lee Hau-Shik was born in 1901—just a decade or two earlier than for those I mentioned above, but the world was quite a different place then. No world war was on the horizon. The Qing Dynasty was still trying to save itself after suffering defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War of 1895, losing…

Climate and Environmental Governance: Building Cooler Cities for a Cooler Future

We have only 10 years left! The intergovernmental panel on climate change predicts this is the amount of time we have left to implement change before a global temperature rise of 1.5°C becomes irreversible. If we want to have a cooler future, sacrificing more forests for urban development is no…

The Future is Physical

It's been a year since the Covid-19 outbreak first became a major international story and educational institutions, from kindergartens to universities, were forced to move their operations online. So what have we learnt and what changes will be permanent? > Online teaching That brief statement…

Computing Students Selected to MMSA 2020 Program

Bachelor of Science (Honours) Information Systems (Business Analytics) students, Chan Wei Chee, Chan Wei Wei…

No Fees, No Teachers and No Classrooms: Sunway Launches 42KL, Malaysia’s First Such Coding School

42 is the first in the world to offer peer-to-peer learning and is completely merit-based. The only requirement is that students must be above 18 years old. This ground-breaking coding school has a disruptive educational model as it has no tuition fees, no teachers, and no traditional classrooms.…