Cover Professor Cuilin Zhang, Founding director of the Global Centre for Asian Women’s Health at the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine
Professor Cuilin Zhang, Founding director of the Global Centre for Asian Women’s Health at the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine
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As global investment and research in women’s health gain momentum, the Global Centre for Asian Women’s Health at the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine is positioning Singapore as a leading hub in the field. Founding director Professor Cuilin Zhang shares the science and ambition behind that vision
At the Philanthropy Asia Summit in Singapore this May, the panel on women’s health innovation drew a large audience—one of several signs of how far the conversation around women’s health has come. Anchored by the Global Centre for Asian Women’s Health (GloW) at the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, also known as NUS Medicine, the session brought together representatives from the Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Nations Population Fund.
Representing GloW on the panel was its founding director, NUS Medicine’s chair professor for women’s health, Cuilin Zhang, who expressed during the interview with Tatler: “I’m pleased to see that women’s health is entering the mainstream of major conversations on healthcare … it’s a great opportunity for us to ensure that the momentum can be sustained.”
The necessity of doing so is underscored by a deep structural imbalance in global medical research: according to the WEF’s The Women's Health Innovation Radar 2026 report, just 20 per cent of research funding awarded between 2016 and 2024 for the ten highest-impact conditions affecting women went to women-focused programmes. Beyond women-specific conditions, only 16 per cent of scientific publications and fewer than 3 per cent of clinical trials between 2016 and 2025 focused on women. The result is a medical evidence base that frequently fails to account for women’s biology.
This stark research gap is precisely the problem GloW was established to address. To steer the multidisciplinary research centre in leading this scientific shift, Zhang leverages her deep background in research, having spent 14 years conducting clinical and translational research on women’s and children’s health at the National Institutes of Health in the US and serving as senior investigator before being recruited by the National University of Singapore (NUS) three years ago. Her extensive credentials also directly inform her strategic leadership of GloW.
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Above Closing long-standing gaps in research could transform health outcomes for women across every stage of life
Closing long-standing gaps in research could transform health outcomes for women across every stage of life
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Alongside her director role, she leads the Population Health Study programme at the Asian Centre for Reproductive Longevity and Equity, holds adjunct professorships at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed papers. This immense academic footprint provides a direct bridge to global collaborators, ensuring the centre’s direction is built on rigorous, globally recognised evidence.
The historical neglect of women’s health, Zhang suggests, stems from both how the field has been defined and how research has conventionally been conducted. “The traditional [view] tended to see women’s health primarily [through the lens of] reproduction and pregnancy rather than taking a more holistic approach,” she expounds. Furthermore, for decades, clinical trials were built around male physiology, in part, as she puts it, “to avoid complexities related to hormonal changes”. Both of these factors, she says, “could affect trial results”.
Even within the traditional focus on reproduction, the deeper implications of a woman’s health have historically been misunderstood, as its impact extends far beyond the individual to future generations. Zhang points to research linking a mother’s health during pregnancy to her children’s long-term outcomes. Pregnancy, she explains, works almost like a “stress test”, revealing susceptibilities to chronic disease that can shape a family’s health for a generation. “A growing body of research has demonstrated the importance of women’s health for healthy longevity—not just for women themselves, but for their children, the next generation and the whole family,” she says.
To systematically close these gaps and address women’s health across every stage of life, GloW’s research framework expands far beyond conventional boundaries. The centre’s research spans five areas: cardiometabolic health, reproductive health, ageing and longevity, mental health and wellness, and cancer screening and prevention. Its work is guided by three broader principles: a holistic view of women’s health across these domains, a life-course approach that treats each stage of a woman’s life as interconnected rather than distinct, and a stronger emphasis on prevention over treatment.
Above Professor Cuilin Zhang speaking at the NUS Medicine Graduate Studies Commencement Dinner
Professor Cuilin Zhang speaking at the NUS Medicine Graduate Studies Commencement Dinner
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Scaling this comprehensive approach up to the world stage requires a massive structural shift to elevate women’s health into a top-tier global priority, and Zhang highlights the WEF’s Global Alliance for Women’s Health as a vehicle driving this change. Launched in January 2024 with US$55 million in initial pledges from 42 organisations, the initiative marked a major turning point by bringing coordinated multi-sector investment to the table.
Published alongside its launch, the WEF and McKinsey Health Institute report, Closing the Women’s Health Gap: A $1 Trillion Opportunity to Improve Lives and Economies, put forth one of the field’s most cited statistics: women spend, on average, 25 per cent more of their lives in poor health when compared to men. Closing that gap, the report estimates, could add more than US$1 trillion annually to the global economy by 2040.
While global attention and investment are finally turning towards women’s health, the immediate challenge, says Zhang, is ensuring that this momentum translates into stronger evidence rather than simply greater awareness. “We need to show that [these findings on women’s health] are grounded in rigorous science rather than just a hypothesis,” she says. Equally important, she adds, is ensuring that Asian women are placed at the centre of this solution to closing these research gaps.
Above A growing focus on Asian women is helping researchers build a more representative evidence base for women’s health
A growing focus on Asian women is helping researchers build a more representative evidence base for women’s health
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An Asian Lens
For Zhang, basic biology is the most compelling argument for Asian-specific research. Even when an Asian and a Caucasian woman share the exact same weight and body mass index, their body composition can be completely different. “Asian women usually have more fat and less lean muscle,” she explains, noting that this hidden fat drastically alters one’s risk of diabetes and even how obesity should be defined.
Asian and Caucasian women also metabolise glucose and insulin differently, which means that the diagnostic criteria for, say, gestational diabetes—a condition that affects Asian populations at disproportionately high rates—developed for one group cannot always be applied wholesale to the other. Recognising this, researchers from GloW are leading an active study titled Etiology and Prediction of Gestational Diabetes from Preconception, which draws on data from the Nurses’ Health Study II and the Fetal Growth Study led by the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as well as two of Singapore’s long-running birth cohort studies: Growing Up in Singapore Towards Healthy Outcomes (GUSTO) and the Singapore PREconception Study of Long-Term Maternal and Child Outcomes (S-PRESTO).
By comparing these datasets, researchers are examining whether risk factors identified in Western populations also hold true for women in Singapore.
Beyond diagnostics, GloW is studying how the principles of the Mediterranean diet, widely regarded as a benchmark for cardiovascular health, can be adapted to Asian ingredients, food cultures and eating habits. “We cannot generalise findings from other populations to Asian populations,” Zhang emphasises. “We need to have our own high-quality, evidence-based data.”
This need is particularly pressing given Asia’s population and disease burden. Despite being home to roughly 60 per cent of the world’s population, the region has relatively few centres dedicated to women’s health research, with a specific focus on Asian populations—leaving, in Zhang’s view, massive opportunities to transform care across a range of conditions affecting women in the region, from cardiometabolic disease to preventable cancers such as cervical cancer.
From research to impact
That ambition to build stronger evidence for Asian women extends beyond GloW’s own research. In January this year, stewardship of the Women’s Health Impact Tracking (WHIT) platform transitioned to GloW. Developed by the WEF in collaboration with the McKinsey Health Institute, WHIT is a first-of-its-kind publicly accessible platform designed to measure progress in closing the women’s health gap. It tracks health outcomes and gaps in care delivery across countries, measuring year-on-year progress against a 2024 baseline.
In a statement on the handover, NUS Medicine dean Professor Chong Yap Seng said the school would build on WHIT’s existing foundation, developing it into a long-term resource for policymakers, clinicians, researchers and the public. He also stressed that coordinated international effort would be essential. Zhang echoed that point, describing the work ahead as requiring “tremendous, joint efforts from multiple disciplines in our ecosystem—involving epidemiologists, clinicians, data scientists, economists and more”. For this interview, she distilled the ambition more simply: “Our work is not just to maintain [the platform]. It’s important to elevate it, to expand it.”
Zhang believes GloW earned stewardship of WHIT through years of groundwork. Long before women’s health became a global priority, NUS had invested in the field, backed by strong institutional support, internationally recognised research, and a growing network of collaborators that includes the medical schools at Harvard University and Stanford University. “Singapore is also unique—[it has] geopolitical and economical strengths that we cannot ignore,” she says. With its depth of expertise across medicine, engineering and business, the country, Zhang argues, is well placed to become a global leader in women’s health.
That network took more concrete form in March 2025 with the launch of the NUS Medicine-Harvard Chan Women’s Health Initiative. By combining data from the US and Singapore, the partnership is building what its organisers describe as one of the largest cohorts of Asian and Asian American women in existence. It also includes a dedicated scholarship for early-career researchers in the field.
Above Professor Cuilin Zhang is advancing a more inclusive approach to women’s health research, centred on the needs of Asian women
Professor Cuilin Zhang is advancing a more inclusive approach to women’s health research, centred on the needs of Asian women
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When asked how attitudes towards women’s health differ between Asia and the US, where she spent more than two decades studying and working, Zhang raises menopause as an example. In the US, she observes, women tend to be more proactive in seeking help for their symptoms and are treated accordingly. Across much of Asia, however, menopause is still considered too private to discuss, leaving many women without the care they require.
Clinics equipped to manage its symptoms remain uncommon in the region, although she notes that the National University Health System is expanding its efforts in this area. GloW is also broadening the conversation around menopause, looking beyond hot flashes and brain fog to its effects on vascular health and weight, while studying how diet and exercise may help. “We want to know more about menopause and perimenopause from a research and scientific perspective,” she states. “We’d like to provide more evidence-based data.”
Zhang is equally encouraged by growing investor interest in women’s health, although she believes funding remains far below the scale of the opportunity. “There is more investment coming into women’s health, but compared to what’s been done for men’s health in general, we’re still lacking a lot,” she says. Translating research into real-world impact, she argues, will require stronger connections between academia, capital and industry. “The more I work on the research, the more I feel that capital is so important. Investment can make a big change—especially for innovation, research and translational research.”
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