Dr Lai, Managing Director of EM Engineering, joined EM Services as Senior General Manager in 2016. His transformative leadership has propelled the engineering business to more than twice its size today.

With a career spanning over 35 years, Dr Lai’s journey encompasses the entire value chain, from research to contracting. He pioneered new product development services at PSB Corporation helping SMEs to bring their product from laboratory to market, led multinational R&D teams at Thermo Fisher Scientific, and initiated Opto Precision, a venture into optical thin-film coating. Dr Lai’s expertise extends to technology commercialisation during his tenure at SIMTech, ASTAR.

Over the last 12 years, he has played a pivotal role in advancing M&E products and services, contributing innovation and new technologies to the building services sector. Dr Lai’s flagship projects include the M&E design review and maintenance setup for the Singapore SportsHub, chiller plants upgrade of commercial complexes and government buildings to achieve Greenmark Platinum for the Health Science Authority building, the replacement/installation of over 3,000 lifts in Town Councils and HDB Built-TO-Order blocks.

His knowledge spans various domains of supply chain and across disciplines, including Vertical Transportation, IoT, Video Analytics, Robotics, Energy Management Systems, Optical Thin-film Coating, and Electrochemistry.

Dr Lai holds a PhD (Control) from the University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UK), a Master of Engineering (Electrical) from the National University of Singapore, and an MBA from the Open University (UK). His inspiring leadership and diverse expertise continue to drive success at EM Engineering.