Heat Resilience & Performance Centre - HRPC

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Heat Resilience & Performance Centre - HRPC

Discover, Detect, Strengthen. We are globally-connected with core expertise in thermal research, exercise physiology and translational research.

The Heat Resilience & Performance Centre (HRPC) is a first-of-its-kind research centre focused on addressing more fundamental and forward-looking approaches to address the challenges associated with living and working in rising ambient heat. Our vision is to be a global leader in thermal research centred on helping humans thrive in a warming world. Our mission is to create holistic and forward-looking solutions that boost human resilience to rising ambient heat. Our research thrusts aim to Discover, Detect, and Strengthen. DISCOVER – In-depth understanding and discovery of new knowledge in heat resilience and injuries through the building of innovative capabilities and data platforms;
DETECT – Visualising and sensemaking an individual’s heat-health and resilience status leveraging next-generation technology and analytics; and
STRENGTHEN – Developing state-of-the-art tools and technology-enabled approaches to boost heat resilience. More information about HRPC, please visit https://medicine.nus.edu.sg/hrpc/

14/11/2025

Building on National University of Singapore and NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine ’s 120 years of excellence and innovation, we embrace every opportunity to inspire the next generation by making science accessible, engaging, and relevant to their everyday lives.

At the Cedar Girls' Secondary School Learning Festival & STEM Showcase, our team explored with the students how we prepare for life in a warmer future through science, stories, and experiential learning.
🔥 Inside the Experiential Climate Pod, students took a step into the future, feeling what Singapore’s climate could be like in 2050, with heat and humidity levels simulated in real time.
📡 At the Heat Resilience Booth, students discovered how technology and sensemaking data can help us adapt to our changing environment.
🎤 And in a heartfelt session, our Research Fellow Dr Sharifah Badriyah, a proud ex-Cedarian, shared her journey “An Ex-Cedarian’s Mission to Empower Human Performance in a Hotter Climate.” From athlete to scientist, her story inspired students to see how curiosity in sports and science can lead to meaningful careers in climate resilience.

Thank you Cedar Girls for the opportunity to empower and inspire!

Explore the highlights and join us in championing heat resilience for all.

31/10/2025

Our very first Sports Day was more than just fun and games. It was a meaningful reminder of what teamwork and connection can do. It brought our people together to unwind, recharge, and bond beyond the lab and office walls, strengthening the spirit that drives our shared mission every day.

As we reset and refocus for the bigger purpose ahead, we carry forward this energy and camaraderie to continue advancing human potential for health and performance in a warming world.

🎥 Enjoy the highlights from this memorable day!

NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine National University of Singapore

24/10/2025

At the recent World Health Summit , experts Leah Werner, Ashley Ward, Neil Bernard, Chris Carter, Ethel Maciel & A/Prof Jason Lee came together to discuss how rising temperatures are reshaping public health — and more importantly, how we can build resilience at personal, community, and system levels.

Moderated by Femi Oke and supported by The Rockefeller Foundation, the key priorities for action highlighted are;
🔹 Centering vulnerable groups — including low-income communities, workers, pregnant and disadvantaged women, people experiencing homelessness — whose heightened risks remain under-researched and often overlooked.
🔹 Building on trusted relationships - “Community Lighthouse” resilience hubs in faith-based and civic institutions provide a scalable community model for providing a trusted places for cooling, wellness checks, and other support services during extreme heat.
🔹 Speaking a common language - listen to what people are experiencing in their daily lives, build on existing community survival strategies, and secure livelihoods first so health measures are feasible
🔹 Harnessing traditional knowledge in addition to modern innovations - such as traditional settlement designs, Miyawaki “tiny forest”, and quantum computing, to advance understanding and interventions of heat impacts.
🔹 Shifting from declarations to implementation and funded action - the COP30 Belém Action Plan is one such shift with focus now on climate-health surveillance and data integration; capacity building and infrastructure for health systems; innovation & technology, including decarbonising healthcare.
🔹 Broadening the heat conversation beyond health to economic and social well-being, using the “HEALTH” lens (Housing, Energy, Agriculture, Labor, Transportation/Infrastructure, Health), aligning incentives and demonstrating benefits across sectors to make whole-of-society action possible
🔹 Uniting evidence + empathy - Data-driven risk management combined with compassion and trusted relationships drives adoption and success.

As A/Prof Jason Lee shared in closing, every vulnerability exposed by heat is also a chance to rebuild stronger, fairer systems. Let us transform vulnerability into opportunity, using this moment to address root inequalities and build climate-resilient communities.

World Health Organization (WHO) World Meteorological Organization National University of Singapore NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine

17/10/2025

As global temperatures rise, chronic heat - the prolonged, everyday exposure to high temperatures - is emerging as an under-recognised but pressing public health challenge. Beyond heatwaves, chronic heat silently affects our physical health, mental wellbeing, and productivity, especially in tropical regions like Southeast Asia.

In this latest collaboration piece with Asian Development Bank (ADB) emerging from the 1st INSPIRE Health Forum, A/Prof Jason Lee, Dr Janice Ho, Dr Eduardo Banzon and Mr Brian Riley explore how chronic heat reshapes lives, the urgent need for data-driven approaches and solutions, and the opportunities for effective chronic heat management to support systemic change.

Read the full piece here: https://development.asia/insight/unseen-risk-chronic-heats-growing-threat-public-health

World Health Organization (WHO)
World Meteorological Organization
NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine

10/10/2025

At the Milken Institute 12th Annual Asia Summit , the closed-door roundtable “In the Hot Seat: Financing Asia’s Heat Resilience” featured Assoc Prof Jason Lee alongside Robert Hunziker (Swiss Re Corporate Solutions) and Pushkala Ratan (IFC), moderated by Zonibel Woods (ADB).

Key takeaways from the discussions:
- Heat is a powerful “horizontal” risk shaping every part of life, with disproportionate impacts on disadvantaged women, home-based and informal workers, and agricultural communities. This calls for a livelihoods‑first approach that protects income and health together.
- The insurance and finance sectors are mobilising: Parametric heat insurance can support recovery and close protection gaps. Private capital is moving into climate adaptation, while blended finance and PPPs can help scale solutions.
- Whole‑of‑society governance is essential to align efforts and unlock cross‑ministry, cross‑sector benefits (e.g., demonstrating how $1 delivers value across multiple portfolios).

We’re encouraged by the momentum in these sectors and look forward to more opportunities to accelerate heat‑resilient solutions across Asia.

08/10/2025

Singapore’s high humidity, coupled with rising global temperatures, places outdoor workers, like delivery riders, at heightened risk of heat stress. Long hours under the sun, combined with dehydration, place heavy demands on the body and can lead to serious health consequences over time.

To address this urgent challenge, the Heat Resilience & Performance Centre is collaborating with Duke-NUS Medical School and Singapore General Hospital on a landmark study. By combining expertise in heat health, occupational research, and clinical care, we aim to better understand these risks and pave the way for stronger protections for those most exposed.

We’re still recruiting participants, do help us spread the word! Together, we can safeguard the health and wellbeing of our outdoor workers in a warming world.

More information here: https://nus.syd1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_a5DcoKe0Dzmtgqy?Q_CHL=qr

NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine National University of Singapore Singapore General Hospital

03/10/2025

As Singapore’s population ages and global temperatures climb, protecting older adults from the health risks of extreme heat is a mission we carry forward every day. At HRPC & HPTRP, our goal is to maximise human potential for health and productivity in a warming world. Through interdisciplinary research — spanning physiology, clinical science, and social science — we put this mission into actions:

🌡 Cooling Singapore 2.0 (Work Package B) – an NRF-funded project to understand and adapt to the impacts of urban heat. Together with and , we study how heat affects older adults’ mobility, balance, and real-world decision making under exertional heat stress. These insights help tailor safer, targeted heat-health guidance and protections.

🏠 Leveraging Shared Experience of Urban Heat and Bridging Spatial-Temporal Dissonance: Towards a Climate Resilient Citizenry in Singapore - We study how heat exposure, vulnerability, and adaptation play out in Singaporean households. By combining insights from physiology, ethnography, and history, we aim to inform policies that strengthen urban resilience—particularly for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups like older adults, children, and those living with chronic illness.

🏢Understanding how our elderly adapt to Singapore's climate and environment - We also focus on older adults living in districts identified to be at high risk for heat-health outcomes. Here, our work contributes to developing personalised measures of heat vulnerability, helping individuals and communities better prepare and protect themselves from overheating.

Together, these efforts reflect our commitment to ensuring all people can thrive in a hotter, more challenging world. Watch this space, as we share more about each of the research efforts!

World Health Organization (WHO)
World Meteorological Organization
NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine
National University of Singapore
Singapore Management University
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

26/09/2025

Meet our Data Manager, Bing Yang and Data Engineer, Yifei - The duo keeping the the Heat Resilience & Performance Centre's research and data operations running on solid foundations.

From managing complex datasets to architecting suitable, secure frameworks, organising our data for efficiency, and building dashboards that transform large datasets and complex numbers into actionable insights, their work underpins everything we do in advancing heat resilience and human performance.

Fun challenge!
Yi Fei is also holding a little office icon from the early 2000s. Can you guess what it is? Comment below with your answer!

National University of Singapore
NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine

19/09/2025

It’s been an invigorating week for climate-resilient health in our region. The Global Heat Health Information Network Southeast Asia Hub team joined the Inaugural Western Pacific Action Forum on Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Health Systems, hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific Region, Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health , and the National University of Singapore Centre for Sustainable Medicine.

Our Chair, A/Prof Jason Lee, spoke on the panel, “From warnings to action — connecting early warnings, effective communications and health systems”, moderated by Angela Pratt, alongside Renzo Guinto, Angie Bone, Revati Phalkey. He underscored the clear business case for addressing heat and the need for contextualised systems with actionable plans that support livelihoods in chronically hot settings.

Across the discussion from physiology, mental health, policy, and disaster response angles, one message stood out: while we strive to design people‑centred, context‑specific solutions that reach the last mile and protect the most vulnerable, we must also act urgently with pragmatic, good‑enough information, rethinking our traditional ways of working.

The Southeast Asia Hub remains committed to working with partners across the region and globally to turn early warnings into effective, collective action for healthier, more resilient communities.

12/09/2025

Had a great round of conversations and discussions this past week, as we hosted our Cooling Singapore 2.0 collaborators at NUS Medicine. Following a productive round of updates and brainstorming, we toured the insulated environmental rooms where the trials are conducted and offered a hands-on experience of Singapore's heat (WBGT ≈ 35 °C). We also demonstrated our VR “road-crossing” and “shopping” tasks which we use to evaluate the potential impacts of heat on such everyday decision-making tasks.

The visit helped align plans for advancing heat-vulnerability assessment and translating modelling outputs into practical, population- and exertion-tailored advisories for Singapore. Thank you to our partners for the candid exchange—looking forward to the next milestones together.

NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine National University of Singapore

29/08/2025

What makes a heatwave a heatwave?

In general, a heatwave is regarded as a period of hot weather exceeding a certain threshold. But how are these thresholds defined?

Delve further on the latest review on heatwave definitions globally here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/adb5a0

National University of Singapore NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine World Health Organization (WHO) World Meteorological Organization

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https://medicine.nus.edu.sg/hrpc

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