Peng Hwa Ang

Dr. Peng Hwa Ang served as legal advisor to the Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore (ASAS) for more than two decades and then as Chair of the self-regulatory body for six years. He stepped down as Chair in 2024. ASAS is a self-regulatory body set up by the media and advertising industry under the Consumers’ Association of Singapore to regulate all advertising in Singapore.

In his day job, he teaches and researches media law and ethics at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. 

He was a member of 40-strong Working Group on Internet Governance that was appointed by then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to prepare a report for the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society. The report led to the establishment of the Internet Governance Forum.

He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and Oxford universities. In 2008, he spent his sabbatical in Ahmedabad, India, to help start a doctoral programme at the Mudra Institute of Communication, Ahmedabad.

He was President of the International Communication Association in 2015, the first Asian so elected. He is currently editor of the Asian Journal of Communication.

He is interviewed regularly by the Singapore media and has also appeared in articles in the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, TIME magazine, and the Economist magazine’s Marketplace.

A lawyer by training, he worked as a journalist before going on to pursue a Master’s in communication management at the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. in the mass media at Michigan State University.