Sing Tung Teng
Sing Tung Teng, completed his PhD in 2016 under the supervision of Dr. Po Teen Lim, and currently has a position as a lecturer at the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia.
He has made major contributions toward understanding Pseudo-nitzschia diversity in the tropical Western Pacific region, a region with scant information of ASP and the causative species Pseudo-nitzschia, when he was still working on his master degree. His dedication and determination, with the knowledge and skills on Pseudo-nitzschia taxonomy, has granted him with several new species discovery, this included the descriptions of P. kodamae, P. sabit, P. bipertita, and P. limii. He also contributed substantially in the new species descriptions of P. circumpora, P. batesiana, P. lundholmiae, P. fukuyoi, P. simulans, P. nanaoensis, P. chiniana, P. qiana, P. uniseriata, and P. yuensis. He continues to explore the unknowns, discovering more than half of the species in the genus (29 out of 53) in the tropical water of South China Sea, a marginal sea of the Western Pacific.
He has demonstrated extraordinary taxonomic skills, where he introduced a taxonomic grouping of Pseudo-nitzschia based on frustule morphology, which eventually developed into an interactive key to species and database of Pseudo-nitzschia (http://dmitriev.speciesfile.org/key.asp?key=Bacillariales&lng=En&i=1&keyN=2).
One of the most notable aspect of his scientific contributions is how his work in molecular taxonomy, in particular the achievement in ITS2 secondary structure modeling and its adoption in the phylogenetic inferences, helps to move and thrive the research of Pseudo-nitzschia taxonomy and other microalgae.