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 (SMU), where he directs the Centre for Commercial Law in Asia and is the Inaugural Director of the Asian Corporate Law Forum. He is a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and a founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Forum on Corporate Climate Governance, and serves on the editorial boards of several leading Asian, comparative, and corporate law journals.

Dan pioneered the field of intra-Asian comparative corporate law and governance. He has been recognized for both his research and his teaching; among his many honours are the 2023 ECGI Cleary Gottlieb Law Prize – widely regarded as the world's leading annual prize for corporate law scholarship – and the 2025 YPHSL Most Outstanding Legal Studies Teacher Award. His research has been profiled in The Economist, The Japan Times, and The Business Times, and cited by Singapore's apex court. It is regularly published by leading law journals and university presses.

He has held visiting positions at Oxford, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Tokyo, Seoul National, and Melbourne, among others, and has recently delivered invited lectures at Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Beyond the academy, he advises international organizations on corporate law reform in Asia and serves as an expert in high-stakes corporate law disputes across the region.

Prior to joining SMU, Dan spent 14 years at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law (NUS Law), where he held tenure and served as Director of the Centre for Asian Legal Studies, Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law (Cambridge University Press), and Director for Corporate Law at the EW Barker Centre for Law & Business. He was the first member of the Faculty of Law named to the NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Award Honour Roll. Before entering academia, he practised as a corporate-commercial litigator at one of Canada's leading law firms. In 2027, he will return to Columbia, Stanford, and Tokyo as a visiting professor.