Fundamentally, I'm a Pharmaceutical biologist and pharmacognosist. I have vast research experience in transdisciplinary aspects of medicinal plant research, with the principal aim of highlighting the importance of medicinal plants in drug discovery. In recent years, herbal remedies have been considered dietary supplements for disease prevention and alternative/ complementary medicine. The WHO estimates that 80% of the world's population relies on traditional herbal medicine for primary health care. While thousands of plants have been documented in traditional medicine, less research has examined these wild resources; how they are integrated into modern medicine. My scientific research on medicinal plants, based on modern methods, significantly contributed to the generation of scientific data, leading to the merging of this knowledge into modern medicine.

To overcome the severe environmental degradation associated with natural resources mining for concrete production, Assoc. Prof. Ir. Dr Cheah Chee an strived to create novel reduced carbon footprint cement, alternative sand and stone for the construction industry. These alternative materials are produced from industrial by-products, solving the solid waste disposal problems through recycling them into functional construction material. As a result, he invented three national and one international patent granted and four national patents filed on green concrete, which received several national and international invention awards. Furthermore, integrating the inventions with the industrialized building system(IBS), he designed and built the first full-scale green concrete detached house in Malaysia for technology demonstration, research, development and education. Currently, he leads national research supported by MOSTI to develop new processes and innovative material design for large volume reuse of coal combustion by-products to manufacture concrete. Moreover, he initiated a collaboration with one of the country's top five concrete producers to create tangible value for businesses and society based on his inventions. Through the industry linkage, Dr Cheah has led the technology transfer to produce sustainable concrete used nationwide in structure and infrastructure construction to reduce the material and environmental costs of the construction industry.

My research has contributed to progress in Life Sciences and resultant innovations have improved the quality of human life by tackling the bottleneck in current diagnostic testing platforms. Working in the field of diagnostics, my research has contributed to improving management strategies for diagnostics and surveillance of various infectious and genetic diseases, enabling rapid, accurate, sensitive, inexpensive, and point-of-care diagnosis. The multi disciplinary efforts in the development of assays provide user portable multi-sensor detection technologies that are able to give quick preventive action and early diagnosis to ensure the quality of life now and in the future. I have filed various proprietary technologies, specializing in providing affordable point-of-care tests, ambient temperature-stable end-point PCR, multiplex real-time PCR and biosensor tests. Besides working in the university environment, I am involved in licensing and am a consultant to industrial partners to help generate income for the university and the country through the commercialization of my research products.

Rubber that will naturally repair itself after damage has been developed by researchers at the School of Materials and Mineral Resources Engineering at the Universiti Sains Malaysia.

In addition to its most obvious everyday uses, such as in vehicle tyres, rubber also serves in a vast range of engineering and domestic applications and failure can have damaging or even catastrophic consequences. Components such as bearings, gaskets, hoses and cables, for example, can play a critical role in everything from vehicles, aircraft and spacecraft, to industrial machinery and domestic appliances.

Normally, any critical rubber parts need to be regularly inspected by human eye or automatic monitoring equipment to identify degradation and damage and arrange replacement or repair before failure might occur.

"Our new self-healing rubber contributes to worldwide efforts to avoid these difficulties," says Dr Raa Khimi, of the USM team. He points out that the problems with conventional rubber lead to vast quantities of it being scrapped every year. Much of this waste cannot be readily recycled due to the strong chemically cross- linked networks in vulcanized rubber.

"We need more sustainable rubber products for environmental, economic, reliability and safety reasons," Dr Raa Khimi adds, "and self-healing rubber is one of the most appealing approaches."

Tests that modelled the damage sustained during normal use revealed that incorporating the healing chemistry could allow 100% immediate recovery of the original mechanical properties of rubber. The chemistry that performs the healing is reversible and repeatable, in a way that allows continuing mechanical damage to be repaired as it occurs. Moreover, the self- healing process increases the overall lifespan of the rubber by 60 percent.

The research was published in the journal Polymer Testing and the team are now working to further characterise and refine the performance of their innovative material.

"We believe that our novel approach could be widely applied and may greatly increase interest in the use of rubber products in automotive, aerospace, engineering and electronics applications," Dr Raa Khimi concludes.