Speakers

Assoc Prof. Simon Tay

Simon SC Tay is a public intellectual as well as an advisor to major corporations and policy-makers.

He is Chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, the country’s oldest think tank. The SIIA’s work focuses on the politics, economic policies and sustainablity issues that matter to corporatoons and policy makers. The SIIA is ranked by an international survey as a leading think tank in ASEAN and Asia, and has advised the Indonesian and Myanmar governments on foreign investment.

He is concurrently a tenured Associate Professor, teaching international law at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. He has also taught at Harvard Law School, the Fletcher School and Yale University. His book, Asia Alone: the Dangerous Post Crisis Divide from America (Wiley 2010) was well reviewed in the Economist and Financial Times. His comments and interviews feature in the international and regonal media, including the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, NHK Japan and CCTV.

Prof Tay is also Senior Consultant at WongPartnership, a leading Asian law firm of some 300 lawyers and with offices in ASEAN, China and the Middle East. He has served on boards for global companies including MUFG Bank of Japan and was previously Corporate Advisor to Temasek Holdings (2006-09). He has spoken at leading business conferences including the World Economic Forum, APEC CEO Summits and SIBOS, and briefed major corporate boards and financial institutions.

From 1992 to 2008, he served in a number of public appointments for Singapore including as Chairman of the National Environment Agency (2002-08); an independent Member of Parliament (1997-2001); and to coordinate the country’s equivalent of the Peace Corps (1990-93). He was chair or co-chair for a number of public commissions such as Singapore 21, the Singapore Green Plan and the Singapore Concept Plan 2010. In 2006, Prof Tay received a National Day Award. He served Singapore as an Expert and Eminent Person in the ASEAN Regional Forum from 2002 to March 2019.

He is a prize winning author of fiction and poetry. His 2010 novel City of Small Blessings was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize. He graduated in law from the National University of Singapore (1986), where he was president of the student union for three terms. He also holds a Masters in Law from Harvard Law School (1993-94), which he attended on a Fulbright Scholarship and where he won the Laylin prize for the best thesis in international law.

He was born in 1961 and is the only son of the late Tay Seow Huah, who was a senior civil servant in the government reporting to the Prime Minister and Defence Minister, and the late Madam Cheong Keong Hin, a teacher. Prof Tay has one son.