Kanagaratnam Shanmugaratnam

Kanagaratnam Shanmugaratnam (; 2 April 1921 – 28 July 2018), better known as K. Shanmugaratnam, was a Singaporean histopathologist considered Singapore's "father of pathology". He was known for his research on nasopharyngeal carcinoma and founded the Singapore Cancer Registry.

Early life and education Born in Singapore in 1921, Shanmugaratnam was one of five children, and was of Ceylonese Tamil Hindu descent. His father, S. K. Ratnam, was a teacher.

After his completing secondary school education at Victoria School, Shanmugaratnam enrolled into the King Edward VII College of Medicine in 1937, but his education was disrupted by World War II and the Japanese occupation. He eventually graduated in 1947.

As an undergraduate, Shanmugaratnam was noted as a well-rounded student who excelled in cricket, won various academic prizes and served as president of the medical school students' union.

Shanmugaratnam was awarded a fellowship and completed his doctorate at the University of London Postgraduate Medical School in 1957. As a researcher, his main area of expertise was in nasopharyngeal carcinoma, a type of cancer with high incidence rates in Southeast Asia and southern China, where a large percentage of the regional ethnic Chinese diaspora trace their ancestry to.

Shanmugaratnam was a contributor to the development of medical education in Singapore, specifically postgraduate training for licensed local doctors. During the late 1960s, then-Deputy Prime Minister Toh Chin Chye, a former academic at the University of Singapore, made local headlines for censuring the university's medical faculty over their failure to formalise postgraduate medical education and the awarding of local qualifications; he specifically requested Shanmugaratnam, then the Master of the Academy of Medicine, to chair a committee which would oversee this endeavour. This was achieved by 1970 and allowed local doctors to complete specialty training in domestic hospitals under the auspices of the university, with external validation from regulatory bodies in the United Kingdom and Australia, rather than the costlier option of spending several years abroad.

He was appointed Emeritus Professor by NUS in 1986 and continued to lecture and conduct seminars into his early nineties. Throughout the course of his career, he had been a member of various committees and bodies, such as the Academy of Medicine, the Singapore Medical Council and the Union for International Cancer Control.

Personal life Shanmugaratnam had three children, one of whom is statesman and economist Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who served as Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore between 2011 and 2019 and is the 9th and current president of Singapore.