Dr. Siu Yee New
About me
Dr New Siu Yee is an Associate Professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, where she leads the Pharmaceutical and Health Sciences programme. Her research focuses on DNA nanotechnology and optical biosensing, developing fluorescent and colorimetric sensing platforms for nucleic acid and protein detection. She holds a PhD in Chemistry from the National University of Singapore and previously worked as a Scientist at A*STAR's Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Singapore.
She is a TWAS Young Affiliate (2023–2028), a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellow (2021), and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She involves in organising multiple international conferences, such as IUPAC 2025 and ACCC7, and STEM outreach programmes that have reached over 650 school students across Malaysia.
Dr New Siu Yee is an Associate Professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham Malaysia (UNM). She has served as Programme Director for Pharmaceutical and Health Sciences since 2024, and as the School's People and Culture Lead since 2022.
Her research sits at the intersection of DNA nanotechnology, nanomaterials and analytical chemistry. She develops optical biosensing platforms — including DNA-templated silver nanoclusters, gold nanoparticle systems and hybridisation chain reaction strategies — for the detection of nucleic acids, proteins and disease biomarkers. Her work has been published in journals including Small Methods, Analytical Chemistry, Nanoscale, Langmuir and Chemical Communications, and she has contributed invited articles to Chemistry – An Asian Journal and Microchimica Acta.
Dr New completed her BSc in Industrial Chemistry with First Class Honours at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, followed by a PhD in Chemistry at the National University of Singapore. During her doctoral studies she spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She subsequently joined A*STAR's Institute of Materials Research and Engineering in Singapore as a Scientist, where her research on nanoparticle-based biosensing produced two granted patents in the United States and Singapore. She joined UNM in 2013 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2018.
She has secured research funding exceeding RM1 million as Principal Investigator, Supervisor and Co-Investigator, with support from the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia, the Royal Society of Chemistry, L'Oréal-UNESCO and the National Cancer Council Malaysia. She has supervised six PhD students to completion with a full completion rate, alongside more than forty undergraduate research projects.
Dr New was named a TWAS Young Affiliate (2023–2028) by The World Academy of Sciences and received the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship in 2021. Other recognitions include the Malaysian Institute of Chemistry Citation Award, the University of Nottingham's Outstanding Research Supervisor Tri-Campus Award, a Silver Award at the Malaysia Technology Expo, and recognition as a Highly Commended Finalist in the Women of the Future Southeast Asia Awards.
She is active in the international chemistry community, having served as Secretary of the 7th Asian Conference on Coordination Chemistry, as a national organising committee member and session chair at the IUPAC World Chemistry Congress 2025, and as an invited scientific committee chair for the 21st Asian Chemical Congress. She was nominated as an IUPAC Inorganic Chemistry Division Young Observer in 2024. She reviews for international funding bodies including the Royal Society of Chemistry and EPSRC.
Beyond her research, Dr New leads science outreach and equality initiatives. Her Nanokit and Nanosecrets of Butterfly Wings projects translate nanoscience research into hands-on learning, reaching more than 650 school students across over twenty schools in partnership with the Ministry of Education, MySTEM, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and Entopia by Penang Butterfly Farm. She chairs the Outstanding Young Chemist Award organising committee, is a founding member of the STEM Empowerment and Representation Initiative at Nottingham, and served as the sole private-university representative on the national panel reviewing Malaysia's Education Blueprint for higher education. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.