Vivian Balakrishnan - Early Life

Early Life

Balakrishnan was born in 1961 to a Telugu father and a Chinese mother with ancestry from Fuqing, Fujian. He had his primary and secondary education at Anglo-Chinese School, before going on to National Junior College. After graduating from junior college in 1980, he was awarded a President's Scholarship to study medicine at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He served two terms as the president of the NUS Student Union, and later served as chairman of the union council. He chose a postgraduate specialisation in ophthalmology and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1991.

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