Bang recently completed his PhD at the Institute for Manufacturing under the supervision of Professor Tim Minshall.

His thesis, the source of countless sleepless nights, was on the growth of technology-based social enterprises in the manufacturing sector. The study itself was conducted using a qualitative case-study approach on early-stage technology companies in Cambridge such as Raspberry Pi, Simprints, and Waterscope.

Bang also has ridiculous amounts of enthusiasm for virtual reality (VR), introducing it to the IfM in 2016, and later going on to be the founding president of the Cambridge VR/AR society. In the later years of his PhD, Bang won several grants and awards (GCRF grant, CGE grant, Churchill Enterprise main prize, Downing Enterprise main prize) for his idea of using VR to help autistic children in Malaysia (as the starting point) learn better. In early 2022, the Autism VR project was also selected to be a part of Medical i-Teams. The team which worked on the project was excellent and helped shed light on many things which Bang could not do alone. This was a catalyst which sparked great interest within him to contribute back to the i-teams programme as Deputy Programme Director.

Bang is an Associate member of the fellowship (SCR) at Churchill College, where he is also a Steering Committee member of the new Bill Brown Creative Workshop. He advises on the inclusion of new digital technologies (such as… VR) into the workshop.

Prior to Cambridge, Bang received a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from Universiti Sains Malaysia, graduating as valedictorian. He has also worked a few years as an engineer and project manager in industry, GAMUDA (construction) and National Instruments (electronics manufacturing).

When Bang is not moonlighting as the Deputy for i-teams, he currently runs a VR games software development company, which has recently received a grant from the Malaysian government (through MDEC) to develop a prototype. The game, Donjon Fauna, has won the People's Choice Award for the Indie Showcase at Develop:Brighton 2023, the UK's largest game development conference.

Bang is currently a collaborator at the Centre for Technology Management.

Find out more about Bang at https://yongbm.github.io/