Ivy Maria Lim is Associate Professor and Head of Humanities and Social Studies Education, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University where she now teaches courses on the history of Singapore and East Asia. She has been awarded the NIE Excellence in Teaching Commendation three times, most recently being 2022. In 2019, she was also awarded the NIE Innovation Award (Team).

Ivy received her B.A. in History and Political Science from the National University of Singapore with Honours in History. She completed her M.A. by Research in History at National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, working on the history of the Teochew community in colonial Singapore. She was then awarded the Overseas Graduate Scholarship (OGS) by NIE and read her D.Phil. in History at Oxford University where she worked on Japanese piracy and lineage organization in Zhejiang province, China in the sixteenth century. Her research interests include Chinese lineage organizations, social history of the Ming dynasty, as well as the history of Japanese piracy in Ming China. She is currently working on the history of Jiangnan market towns and literati social networks in the late imperial period and is also pursuing secondary lines of research into the history of Chinese education and citizenship education in Singapore.

Ivy has previously worked as an expert advisor and curriculum developer on UNESCO’s Understanding Shared Histories: A Teaching Package which has been translated into Khmer, Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese. Other previous projects include an interdisciplinary research project that used a geo-spatial approach in reading Chinese text documents and a Singapore heritage game project with the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) at NTU. Ivy is a former member of the Chinese Heritage Centre Faculty Advisory Committee and the former Chair of Frontier Primary School's School Advisory Committee. She is currently the President of the History Association of Singapore. In addition, she serves as a member of the National Heritage Board’s National Collections Advisory Panel, the Founder’s Memorial Educators’ Group and the National Library’s rare materials Acquisition Committee.