[7] The Bukit Timah campus houses the Faculty of Law and Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

[9] In September 1904, Tan Jiak Kim led a group of representatives of the Chinese and other non-European communities to petition the governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir John Anderson, to establish a medical school in Singapore.

[10] It was noted by Anderson that there were other petitions prior which were not successful due to concerns over having a sufficient number of students and support from the local community.

[11] In 1912, the medical school received an endowment of $120,000 from the King Edward VII Memorial Fund, started by physician Lim Boon Keng.

[14][15] In 1928,[16] Raffles College, a separate institution from the medical school, was established to promote education in arts and social sciences.

[18] The growth of University of Malaya was very rapid during the first decade of its establishment and resulted in the setting up of two autonomous divisions in 1959, one located in Singapore and the other in Kuala Lumpur.

[19] This was done in part due to the government's desire to pool the two institutions' resources into a single, stronger entity and promote English as Singapore's main language of education.

[20] Most departments of the university were situated at the Bukit Timah campus, with the gradual shift to the Kent Ridge site starting in 1969 and completed in 1986.

NUS has 17 faculties and schools across three campus locations in Singapore – Kent Ridge, Bukit Timah and Outram.

[42] NUS was the 27th best-ranked university worldwide in terms of aggregate performance across THE, QS, and ARWU, as reported by ARTU 2023.

[45] The World's Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University features numerous NUS researchers from a wide range of disciplines.

The NUS College program notably involves foreign, service-based exchange around South-East Asia, guided by their core ideal that "Learning is a contact sport.

Today, the school has over 280 distinguished faculty members and a vibrant community of 7,000 students, and is a recognised leader in business education and research across Asia.

She served a four-year term and was reappointed in 1979, but resigned after one year to allow Koh Lip Lin to continue his post.

The principal purpose of NGS is "to promote integrative PhD research encompassing both laboratory work and coursework programmes which not only transcend traditional subject boundaries but also provides students with a depth of experience about science and the way it is carried out.

[77] The Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (YSTCM) is a collaboration between NUS and the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

It is an autonomous college within NUS, allowing it greater freedom to develop its own policies while tapping on the existing facilities and resources of the main university.

[100] The university has received a number of grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for research into areas including vaccine development,[101] water treatment,[102][103] mobile devices in healthcare,[104] iris recognition,[105] synthetic antibodies,[106] tuberculosis,[107] and government response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Asia.

[111] The Next Age Institute, a partnership with Washington University in St. Louis, is the most recent cross-university centre involving NUS, established in February 2015.

[113][114] The NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) programme was started in 2001, giving students the opportunity to experience, live, work and study in an entrepreneurial hub.

Participants of the programme either spend 6 months or a year overseas, taking courses at partner universities and working in start-ups.

NUS's main campus is located in the southwestern part of Singapore, adjacent to the Kent Ridge subzone of Queenstown, accommodating an area of 170 ha (420 acres).

They provide valuable information for scholars who are committed to Southeast Asian history and overseas Chinese research.

Trocki, Australian historian of Southeast Asia and China Carl Anthony Trocki (born and died 1940–2024) British Southeast Asian biologist Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy (1933-) Malaysian banker Yeap Chor Ee (born and died 1867–1952) Personal documents of WangZengshan (born and died 1903–1961), the head of the Chinese Islamic Mission to the Near East (1937–1939) and the Director of the Civil Affairs Department of the Xinjiang Provincial Government of the Republic of China (1945–1949).

[123] UTown hosts four residential colleges, a graduate residence,[124] the Yale-NUS campus, research institutes (such as the TUM CREATE), lecture theatres, restaurants, convenience stores, and a barber shop.

The university has a free Internal Shuttle Bus system that operates across the Bukit Timah and Kent Ridge campuses.

Tembusu houses mainly first and second-year undergraduates, in addition to resident faculty, visiting scholars and graduate fellows.

[134] The former founding Rector of Tembusu College is Singapore's Ambassador-at-Large and former United Nations Ambassador Tommy Koh, who is also the former dean of the NUS Faculty of Law.

It counts among its graduates, heads of state/government Abdul Razak Hussein, Benjamin Sheares, Goh Chok Tong, Mahathir Mohamad and S. R. Nathan.

The first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, attended Raffles College briefly prior to World War II.