​Associate Professor Lai Poh San heads the Human Molecular Genetics Lab of the Department of Paediatrics at Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS and Khoo Teck Puat-National University’s Children Medical Institute (KTP-NUCMI), NUH. Her interests are in human genetics and genomics. She leads several projects related to neuromuscular disorders, congenital diseases and undiagnosed disorders. She has been involved in the development of genetic tests for molecular analysis, prenatal diagnosis and genetic counselling of paediatric genetic diseases in Singapore, having first set-up the laboratory for molecular studies in paediatric disorders such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, retinoblastoma, haemophilia and spinal muscular atrophy in 1989. For this work, she was the recipient of the Singapore National Youth Award for Science and Technology in 1998 (the highest accolade in the country for Science and Technology in youth category). A/Prof Lai was also the sole recipient of the Young Investigator’s Award given by the Singapore Academy of Medicine in 1992 in recognition of outstanding original research work that was presented at the 26th Singapore-Malaysia Congress of Medicine. Currently, she has special interests in harnessing novel next-gen technologies to understand disease pathogenesis for clinical applications. She is involved in the highly collaborative work of implementing genomic medicine for rare diseases through clinical exome and genome sequencing. 

A/Prof Lai serves on a number of international consortiums, advisory committees, editorial journal boards and societies. She is President of the Biomedical Research and Experimental Therapeutics Society of Singapore (BRETSS) and immediate Past President of Asia-Pacific Society of Human Genetics (APSHG). She is an executive committee member of the International Federation of Human Genetics Societies (IFHGS), and member of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) and American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG). She is Co-Chair for the HUGO Pan-Asian Population Genomics Initiative (HUGO-PAPGI) and has served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for health program at the Philippines Genome Center in Manila.  

A/Prof Lai is an adjunct Faculty Member of the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS), Adjunct Principal Member of Technical Staff with the Defence Medical and Environmental Research Institute (DMERI), Defence Science Organisation, Singapore and Scientific Advisor to the Molecular Diagnostic Lab (MDC) at NUH.  She sits on a number of local committees such as the Local Review Panel (OF-YIRG) of the National Medical Research Council, Institutional Review Board for the Defence Science Organization (DSO) and Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) and Institutional Review Board for Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University. At NUS, A/Pro f Lai is the Deputy Chair of the Institutional Biosafety Committee and Vice-Chair of MD1 Tahir Foundation Building Research Safety Committee besides serving on the Centre of Translational Medicine (CeTM) Safety Committee and the YLL School of Medicine Safety Committee. She also serves as Technical Assessor/Expert for the Singapore Accreditation Council (Singapore Laboratory Accreditation Scheme). She sits on the Advisory Board on several genetics and genomics-related organisations and serves on the Editorial Boards of several journals. She also serves on Ph.D. committees, and trains both graduate students and interns. She has extensive collaborations with overseas and local institutes, holding or having held more than 25 grants awarded as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator. She has two patents filed in the field of diagnostics and therapeutics for muscular dystrophy.