Edmund Mai Hiong Tay was a professor of prosthetic dentistry and dean of the dental faculty at the National University of Singapore. He was born in Sapong, a small town about 100 miles from Jesselton, British North Borneo, the son of a Chinese planter, Tay Geok Chun and his wife, Mdm Yap Ngo Neo. His mother died when he was three after giving birth to his brother. His father remarried and had ten more children. His early childhood was mostly spent enjoying the wilderness, but at the age of 13 he was sent to Singapore to continue his education in English. At St Anthony’s Boys’ School, he met a kind and dedicated teacher, Leslie A Woodford, who took him on as his ward. His adolescence naturally revolved around the early scouting movement as Woodford, or ‘Black Bear’ as he was better known, went on to become the chief commissioner of the Boy Scouts Association, Singapore. ‘Wadaga’ (the swimmer) was Edmund’s scout name, and he was one of the first in peninsula Malaya to earn the king’s scout badge. The outdoor survival skills he honed through scouting proved useful during the Japanese Occupation, when he and his ‘adopted’ family were resettled in an agricultural commune in the jungle near Bahau, Malaya, specially set up for Eurasians and Chinese Catholics. Fuji-Go or ‘beautiful village’ turned out to be a malaria-infested swathe with soil that could not sustain farming. Sanitation was also poor and many succumbed to dysentery, malaria or malnutrition. It was estimated that some 500 settlers (about one in six) lost their lives there. It was there in God-forsaken Bahau, amidst unimaginable human suffering and death, that he first embraced Christianity. In many ways the war forged his character and the strong views he held about life. He understood, firsthand, what it was like to have no food in his belly, yet he harboured no lasting bitterness but instead was able to draw strength from the experience. When the war finally ended, he was treated as a prisoner of war and was flown back to Jesselton by the British forces. In 1947, his childhood dream of becoming a doctor appeared to be within reach when he secured one of the few places as a medical student at the King Edward VII College of Medicine, University of Malaya, where he met his future wife Anne Quah Quee Cheng. He topped his class in anatomy but, unfortunately, during his first year, his father passed away suddenly, and he had to go back to Borneo where, as the eldest son, he was expected to look after the family estate. As dentistry was a year shorter than medicine, he made the decision to switch his course of study so he could graduate a year earlier to support his family in Borneo. What appeared at first to be a great sacrifice turned out, in his own words, to be a blessing in disguise as he applied himself totally to his new profession. His serendipitous personification as ‘The acci-dental pioneer’ has been chronicled in *Imagination, openness & courage: the National University of Singapore at 100* (Singapore, National University of Singapore, 2006). Edmund had always been the gifted all-rounder; the high achiever with a never-say-die attitude. He was an outstanding sportsman during his undergraduate years, receiving commendations in field hockey, swimming and long-distance running. He was active in the University Students’ Union’s executive council and was also the president of the Catholic Students’ Society. Because he was consistently one of the top students in his cohort, he was hand-picked by R J S Tickle, professor of dental surgery and head of the department of dentistry, to join the dental department in October 1952. As it turned out, Edmund spent his entire career in academia. He began as a demonstrator earning a measly monthly salary of $400, eventually attained a full professorship in prosthetic dentistry in 1972 and retired in 1986 after 34 years of service to the University. He was elected dean of the dental faculty in September 1966, a position he held for 19 years. He was the longest serving dean in the history of the National University of Singapore and had the distinction of working under five different vice chancellors. As the founding dean, he visited dental faculties in UK, Denmark, Canada and USA, and incorporated their best practices when redesigning the dental curriculum, including the shortening of the undergraduate course to four years. He described his pioneering approach: ‘Dentistry in the post-war years was considered a very poor second choice to medicine. One reason for this was when you graduated as a medical person, you were addressed as “doctor” while dentists were merely “mister”. The title “Dr” carried a lot of weight in the community back then. Many unqualified dentists were also practising at the time, and this tarnished the image of the dental profession. When dentistry first started, we were a school within the King Edward VII College of Medicine. Later, we became a department within the medical faculty of University of Malaya in Singapore. Throughout this time, we were subservient to the medical faculty. My aim was for dentistry to get equal status as a faculty. If you are master of your own house, you can plan your development. It took us almost seven years agitating the senate to grant us faculty status. Ultimately, we got this in 1966.’ His professed goal as an educator was the ‘development of biologically oriented, technically capable and socially sensitive dental surgeons who are fully aware of their contribution to the total care of their patients… Dentists need to look beyond the molars!’ When the Academy of Medicine (Singapore) was first conceived, he and others in the profession lobbied successfully to put dental specialists on a par with their medical counterparts. He assumed leadership roles in many professional societies and was, notably, the founding chairman of the Chapter of Dental Surgeons (from 1978 to 1980) and third president of the Singapore Dental Association (in 1979). Aside from his academic achievements, my father was also notorious for his loud snoring and ‘enviable’ ability to fall asleep quickly in almost any situation. As he had maintained a slim and tall physique (from his college days as a long-distance runner), was neither a smoker nor a drinker, our medical experts failed to connect his symptoms of snoring and excessive daytime sleepiness to obstructive sleep apnoea. His early medical problems and ultimate demise were directly related to this latter condition, although its more serious cardiac and cerebrovascular sequalae were poorly recognised, at least in the early eighties. Appropriately, the National University of Singapore Edmund Tay Mai Hiong Endowed Fund was posthumously established in August 2015 to not only raise public and medical community awareness of dentistry's emergent role in sleep and airway issues, but to empower and recruit dentists as front-line professionals in the early detection and co-management of many sleep-related disorders, not only obstructive sleep apnoea. The endowment also sponsors an annual distinguished speaker programme and offers scholarships to suitable Singaporean dentists to pursue full-time university-based residency programmes in dental sleep medicine. We hope the creation of this endowment in his honour will recognise his past contributions and further his aspirations for his profession. He died on 22 June 2014 at the age of 88 and was survived by his widow, Anne Quah Quee Cheng, daughter Denise, son David, three grandchildren and six great grandchildren