Lim Chuan Poh
Lim Chuan Poh is a Singaporean civil servant, diplomat and former lieutenant-general who served as the Chief of Defence Force between 2000 and 2003. After leaving the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) in 2003, Lim served as the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education until 2007 before serving as the chairman of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), a statutory board under the Ministry of Trade and Industry. After his retirement in 2019, Lim was appointed as the chairman of the Singapore Food Agency. Education. Lim was awarded the Singapore Armed Forces Overseas Scholarship  in 1980 after studying at Raffles Institution. He holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in mathematics from St John's College, Cambridge. He attended Camberley Staff College in 1988 and graduated with the Best Overseas Student Award. He also received a Master of Business Administration from Cornell University in 1993. He attended the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School in 2003. Military career. Lim enlisted in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) in December 1979. Throughout his military career, he held various appointments, including: Commanding Officer, 3rd Singapore Infantry Regiment; Commander, 10th Singapore Infantry Brigade; Head, Joint  Plans Department; Commander, 9th Division; Chief of Staff (General Staff); Chief of Army. On 1 April 2000, Lim succeeded Bey Soo Khiang as the Chief of Defence Force (CDF) of the SAF. He was promoted from Major-General to Lieutenant-General in June 2001. Lim retired from the SAF on 1 April 2003 and was succeeded by Ng Yat Chung as the CDF. Civil career. From 19 January 2021, Lim is appointed non-resident Ambassador of Singapore to the State of Israel. After leaving the military, Lim served as a Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Education (MOE) from July  2003 to March 2007. During his time in the MOE, Lim oversaw the transformation of the publicly funded universities into autonomous universities and reviewed the university research framework to help those universities develop into research-intensive ones. He also guided the establishment of the Duke-NUS Medical School. Lim was appointed as the Chairman of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), a statutory board under the Ministry of Trade and Industry, on 1 April 2007. He retired from this post in 2019. He is also the Chairman of the National Infocomm Security Committee and the Governing Board of  the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine of Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Besides, he is a member of various other organisations, including: NTU, A*STAR's Biomedical Research Council, National Research Foundation, , and Japan’s World Premier International Initiative Programme Assessment and Review Committee.