Professor Lily Kong has been President of Singapore Management University (SMU) since 2019.  She is the fifth President and the first Singaporean to lead the 24-year old university. She is also the first Singaporean woman to serve as President of a university in Singapore. She was previously Provost of SMU (2015-2018).

Before joining SMU, she was a faculty member at the National University of Singapore’s Department of Geography for nearly 25 years. She also held various senior management roles at the National University of Singapore, including Vice Provost (Education), Vice Provost (Academic Personnel), Vice President (University and Global Relations), Dean (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences), Dean (University Scholars Programme), and Director (Asia Research Institute).

An award-winning researcher and teacher, Professor Kong has received five international fellowship awards including the Commonwealth Fellowship Award and the Fulbright Fellowship Award. She has also won the Robert Stoddard Award from the Association of American Geographers for her contributions to the study of religion. Professor Kong was conferred the Public Administration Medal (Silver) in 2006 and Public Service Star (Bintang Bakti Masyarakat) award in 2020 as part of Singapore’s National Day Awards.  She was recognised in Forbes Asia’s Power Businesswomen list (2020), Forbes inaugural 50 over 50 (Asia 2022) and Tatler’s Asia’s Most Influential (2022). Professor Kong was inducted into the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame in 2022. 

Professor Kong is widely known for her research on urban transformations, and social and cultural change in Asian cities. In particular, she has published a large body of work on inter-communal religions and social cohesion, national identity, cultural policy and cultural industries, creative cities and creative economy, urban heritage and conservation, smart cities, migration and education. She is on a dozen editorial boards of international journals in her field and is frequently invited as keynote speaker to conferences in her domain.  In a global study by Stanford University (2020), Professor Kong was identified as among the world’s top 1% of scientists in the field of Geography.