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Defending the nation
Mr Leow enjoys dealing with the technical and strategic aspects of the job.
PHOTO: CHONG JUN LIANG
AS A young boy, Mr Leow Heliang was fascinated with science and engineering.
"Much to the horror of my parents, I used to take apart my toys to see how they worked and then fix them back again," he recalls.
He turned his childhood hobby into a career, and is now a senior engineer with Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), the national authority for defence science and technology.
The 31-year-old handles projects that make a meaningful impact on Singapore's defence capabilities.
He says: "I decided to choose the DSTA scholarship because I wanted to work with leading-edge technologies. Being able to serve our nation's defence and security also gives me a sense of fulfilment."
Mr Leow is now with the Networked Systems Programme Centre, which is the principal operating unit of the agency.
Prior to this, he was involved in research and development activities in signal processing and he spent a year at the Sondra Laboratory in France, which is a joint collaboration between French university Supélec, French aerospace research institute Onera, the National University of Singapore and DSTA.
This multi-party collaboration allows researchers from Singapore and France to work together on various projects.
Mr Leow's involvement with Sondra was not his first experience of living and working in France.
Under the terms of his DSTA scholarship, he spent two years at Institut Supérieur d'Electronique de Paris (Isep), a French university, to study electronics and computer engineering.
During his second year there, Mr Leow applied to the Cornell University in the United States to do a Master of Engineering course, which was parallel to his third, and final year, at Isep.
"DSTA strongly supported my application and this allowed me to graduate with a double master's, one from Isep and the other from Cornell," he says.
A career with DSTA, he says, is not just about paper chases or spending all day in research laboratories.
He appreciates being involved in the technical, management and strategic aspects of the job.