Professor Dan W. Puchniak

Dan W. Puchniak is the Yong Pung How Professor of Law at the Yong Pung How School of Law (YPHSL), Singapore Management University, the Director of the YPHSL Centre for Commercial Law in Asia, Inaugural Director of the Asian Corporate Law Forum, a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI), and the inaugural Co-Editor-in-Chief of the ECGI Blog. Dan is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of comparative corporate law and governance, with a focus on Asia. He has received numerous domestic and international awards for his academic research and teaching – most recently, the 2023 ECGI Law Prize for the Best Working Paper and the 2025 YPHSL Most Outstanding Legal Studies Teacher Award. Dan’s research has been profiled in The Economist, The Japan Times, and The Business Times and has pioneered the emerging field of intra-Asian comparative corporate law and governance.

Dan sits on the editorial boards of several leading Asian and comparative law journals – and is a founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Forum on Corporate Climate Governance. He has held visiting academic positions at leading universities around the world, including Chulalongkorn University, Columbia University, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Melbourne University, Nagoya University, Oxford University, Queen’s University, Reichman University, Seoul National University, Stanford University, University of Chicago, University of Tokyo, University of Trento, University of Victoria, Vanderbilt University, and Yangon University. In 2025, Dan gave invited lectures on Asian corporate law and governance at Harvard Law School and UPenn Carey Law. He has advised international organizations on the development of corporate law in Asia, served as an expert in high stakes complex corporate law disputes in Asia, and his research has been cited several times by Singapore’s apex court.

Prior to joining SMU, Dan was tenured at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law (NUS Law), where he directed the Centre for Asian Legal Studies, was Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law (Cambridge University Press) and was the Director for Corporate Law at the EW Barker Centre for Law & Business. He won multiple faculty and university level teaching awards and was the first member of the Faculty of Law to be placed on the NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Award Honour Roll. Prior to entering academia, Dan worked as a corporate commercial litigator at one of Canada’s leading law firms.