Principal Investigators

TAN Yaw Sing Assistant Principal Investigator Email: tanys@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Computational Chemical Biology and Fragment-Based Design

Tan Yaw Sing graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) from the National University of Singapore in 2009, with a double major in Chemistry and Life Sciences. Funded by the A*STAR Graduate Scholarship, he proceeded to pursue his postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, where he obtained his PhD in Chemistry in 2014. In the same year, he joined Chandra Verma’s group at the Bioinformatics Institute (BII) as a postdoctoral research fellow. He now leads his own group in BII after he was promoted to the position of Assistant Principal Investigator in April 2021.

Research Interests
Dr Tan’s research interests span the diverse fields of computational chemical biology, computer-aided drug design, and computational structural biology. He hopes to transform current strategies for drug discovery and chemical biology by improving the accuracy of binding site prediction, providing new insights into the structure and dynamics of drug targets, and guiding the rational design of therapeutics and chemical tools.

Group Members

Scientist	NG Tze Yang Justin
Scientist	Meng Zhenyu
Research Officer	CHONG Kian Chee

FAN Hao  Senior Principal Investigator Email: fanh@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Structure-based Ligand Discovery and Design

Hao Fan received his undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences in University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He obtained his PhD in Biophysical Chemistry in Dr. Alan Mark’s lab at University of Groningen (RUG). He worked as postdoctoral fellow followed by research scientist in both Dr. Andrej Sali’s lab and Dr. Brian Shoichet’s lab at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He was appointed Principal Investigator at the Bioinformatics Institute (BII), A*STAR in 2014. Currently He is Senior Principal Investigator at BII A*STAR, Adjunct Associate Professor at NUS Medicine Synthetic Biology Translational Research Program, and Adjunct Associate Professor at DUKE-NUS Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Program.

Research Interests

The broad goal is to develop computational techniques to effectively and accurately model protein-ligand interactions, the developed methods will be applied to therapeutic targets such as GPCRs, transporters and downstream kinases, to contribute to a better understanding and regulation of biological processes, to the discovery of new ingredients for food and nutrition, chemical probes, and drug leads, and to the development of an in-silico platform for chemical toxicity prediction.

Group Members

Senior Scientist I	VERMA Ravi Kumar
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (Collaborator)	LIN Fu
Research Scientist (Adjunct)	KRISHNA Deepak
Senior Scientist I	JALADANKI Chaitanya Kumar
Scientist	SUPEKAR Shreyas
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (Collaborator)	HARTONO Yossa Dwi
Scientist	WEI Wan
Scientist	LIM Jun Yu Victor
Research Officer	RAYAKAR Achal Ajeet
Research Officer	LAM Joanne
PhD Student	TIKHONOVA  Anastasiia
PhD Student	BEHN Julian
PhD Student (co-supevisor)	WANG Kaichen
PhD Student (co-supevisor)	PICUCCI Francesca Harriet
PhD Student	HAN Sungho Bosco

BOND Peter J.  Senior Principal Investigator Email: peterjb@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Multiscale Simulation, Modelling and Design

Peter J. Bond is a Senior Principal Investigator of the Multiscale Simulation, Modeling and Design (MSMD) group at the Bioinformatics Institute (BII) A*STAR, Singapore, and Adjunct Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research interests include host-pathogen interactions, receptor signaling, and virus dynamics. Following his graduation in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford in 2001, Peter moved to the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics to read for a DPhil, supported by a Wellcome Trust Prize Studentship, and was subsequently awarded an EMBO Long-Term Fellowship hosted at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt. In 2010, he became a University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, before moving to Singapore in late 2013.

Group Members

Senior Scientist I	KRAH Alexander
Senior Scientist I	MARZINEK Jan
Senior Scientist I	SAMSUDIN Mohd Firdaus
Scientist	PALUR Venkata Raghuvamsi
Scientist	SOMBOON Kamolrat
Scientist	MASIREVIC Srdan
PhD Students	DAVIES Thomas Stefan
PhD Students	WEERAKOON Dhanushka

BEREZOVSKY Igor N.  Senior Principal Investigator Email: igorb@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Physics and Evolution of Biological Macromolecules

Igor Berezovsky studied physics at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MSc, 1993) and obtained PhD in physics and mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (1997). He started his scientific career at the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology (Moscow) where he conducted his MSc and PhD research, then worked as a research fellow (until 1998). After postdoctoral researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science (1999-2002) and the Harvard University (2003-2006), Igor was a senior scientist/group leader at the Bergen Center for Computational Science, University of Bergen (Norway) before joining the Bioinformatics Institute in January 2014.

Group Members

Senior Scientist II	SU Tran-to Chinh
Scientist	TEE Wei Ven
Scientist	DONG Bingxue
Research Officer	KRITHIKA Subramani
PhD Student	AMANGELDINA Aidana

VERMA Chandra S. (Head) Deputy Director (Research), Senior Principal Scientist III Email: chandra@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Atomistic Simulations and Design in Biology

Chandra Verma joined the Bioinformatics Institute (BII) A*STAR, Singapore, in November 2003. He heads the division of Biomolecular Modelling and Design and leads a group that applies physics-based models to understand the links between protein sequence, structure and biological function. His group works closely with experimental laboratories where the hypotheses generated are tested. In addition, the group is also involved in designing peptides and small molecules (through virtual screening) both for interrogating biology as well as for therapeutic purposes. Prior to joining Singapore, he worked at the Structural Biology Laboratory in York, UK. He obtained his undergraduate degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, India and his D. Phil at the University of York. He has cofounded two spinoffs: Sinopsee Therapeutics combines a yeast-based platform and modelling with colleagues in A*STAR at IMCB and BTI to screen for and develop new molecules against targets in oncology and opthalmology. Series A funding is being explored for a novel potential therapeutic (eye drop). & Aplomex (design small molecules, peptides, proteins/enzymes and antibodies).

Group Members

Principal Scientist 1	NGUYEN Ngoc Minh
Principal Scientist 1	SRINIVASARAGHAVAN Kannan
Principal Scientist 1	LI Jianguo
Scientist (T-up with Aplomex)	ARONICA Pietro
Scientist	SHIVGAN Aishwary
Scientist (Adjunct)	MALIK Ashar
PhD Student	LAM Joshua, ARAP (Univ Manchester)
PhD Student	STAMATIS Dimitrios, ARAP (Univ Southampton)
PhD Student	YEO Hui Qing, joint (Duke-NUS)
PhD Student	JEYARAJ Suja Nitish, joint (NTU)

Bhanu Prakash K.N.   Principal Investigator Email: bhanu_prakash@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Clinical Data Analytics & Radiomics

Bhanu Prakash K.N. obtained Ph.D. degree from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2002. He was a Senior grade lecturer in Visvesvaraya Technological University before joining Biomedical Imaging Lab in Institute of Infocomm Research (Agency for Science, Technology and Research – A*STAR, Singapore) in 2003 and later moved to Bioinformatics Institute in 2004 as Research Scientist. He then moved to Singapore Bioimaging Consortium (SBIC, A*STAR) in 2005 and was part of the Biomedical Imaging Lab. Later in 2012, he moved to Laboratory of metabolic imaging and was promoted as Group Leader of Signal & Image processing Group in 2006. He has more than 40 publications in peer-reviewed journals and 13 patents granted (4 patents have been licensed to a spin-off company and 2 patents to a start-up) and about 70 abstracts along with a few media releases.

His main interests are in Biomedical signal & Image analysis, Pattern Recognition, AI, Clinical decision support systems, Differential diagnosis, Radiomics and Population based studies in Neuro and precision medicine. He is actively involved with RadiologyAsia and SGCR-WIRES activities and a member of ISMRM and IEEE. He has delivered many lectures and seminars in Singapore and overseas. In addition to his scientific contributions, he has organized and chair-ed several symposiums and seminars over the years. He serves as a reviewer to Neurotrauma, IJCARS, Scientific Reports, MDPI, Journal of Electronics, MAGMA and many other journals. He is the guest editor for “Novel Technologies on Image and Signal Processing” a special issue by MDPI Electronics and a member of Editorial board for Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging (AIMI). 

Biomedical signal & Image analysis, Pattern Recognition, AI, Clinical decision support systems, Differential diagnosis, Radiomics and Population based studies in Neuro and precision medicine. 

Group Members

Scientist	CHILLA V.N. Geetha Soujanya
Lead Research Officer II	CHANNARAYAPATNA SRINIVASA Arvind
Senior Research Officer II	YEOW Ling Yun

YU WeiMiao  Principal Investigator Email: yu_weimiao@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Computational Digital Pathology Lab

Yu Weimiao is an image processing and AI/ML expert in bioimage informatics and computational digital pathology. He is currently a joint Principal Investigator and group leader of IMCB and BII, leading two groups to address different challenging problems in the field. Dr. Yu obtained his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2007. He joined Agency of Science, Technology, and Research(A*STAR) in 2007. His research interests are Computational Biomedical Image Analysis and Quantitative Imaging Informatics based on AI and machine learning. His research outcomes were published in top international peer-reviewed journals, such as Nature Cell Biology, Nature Communication, Breast Cancer Research, Bioinformatics, Current Biology, etc. Dr. Yu and his teams focus on pushing the quantitative and reliable cellular/ molecular image analysis and diagnosis solutions from academic research to clinical decision making. The previous research and R&D projects with hospitals, biotech, and pharmaceutical companies equipped his teams with solid skills and expertise in medical algorithms development and validation. His teams integrate methodologies from multiple fields, such as signal processing, image processing and computer vision, optimization, machine learning, pattern recognition, mathematical modelling, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Deep Learning (DL) with the input of pathologists, oncologists, and cell biologists. Dr. Yu is not only active in academic research; he is also an entrepreneur. He co-founded a biotech company, known as A!maginostic Pte. Ltd. Dr. Yu has established close collaboration with the Pathology Division/Department of three clinical research centers, Singapore General Hospital (SGH), National University Hospital (NUH) and Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), to ensure a smooth R&D pipeline and data source of developing the computational digital pathology solutions. Dr. Yu established a world-class joint lab of excellence for immunodiagnosis at the tissue level. Such a platform allows the researchers, clinicians, and pharma to profile the patient immune signature for diagnosis, prognosis and drug response study, etc.

https://www.rsc.a-star.edu.sg/technologyplatforms/scientific-side-menu/scientific-information/histopathology/model-based-digital-pathology-services

Group Members

Senior Scientist I	ONG Kok Haur
Scientist	LU Haoda
Scientist	YUAN Chengxiang
Scientist	LIM Jun Yu Victor
Senior Research Officer	MARINI Gabriel Pik Liang
Senior Research Officer II	HUO Xinmi
Research Officer	LI Longjie
Research Officer	PENG Aisha

LOO Lit Hsin  Senior Principal Investigator Email: loolh@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Complex Cellular Phenotype Analysis Lab Website:  http://web.bii.a-star.edu.sg/~loolh

Loo Lit Hsin is a Senior Principal Investigator at the Bioinformatics Institute (BII), A*STAR, Singapore. He is also an adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Pharmacology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. Dr. Loo’s background is in computational and systems pharmacology/toxicology. He was the recipient of the Lush Prize – Science Award (2016), Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research (2010) and the Alfred Gilman Award (2009) by the University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) Medical Center, and the Doctoral Award in Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (2005) by Drexel University. Dr. Loo was a postdoctoral fellow in the Bauer Center for Genomics Research at Harvard University (2005), and then in the Department of Pharmacology at the UTSW Medical Center, USA (2005-2010).

Research Interests

Dr. Loo’s background is in computational and systems pharmacology/toxicology. He is leading an interdisciplinary team of scientists developing in vitro and computational models for predicting the effects and/or targets of chemical compounds with diverse or unknown structures. Dr. Loo is also leading A*STAR’s participations in the International Workgroup on Accelerating the Pace of Chemical Risk Assessments (APRCA) and the associated Point-of-Departure case study. His research team has developed novel imaging-based phenotypic profiling methods and tools that led to the first high-throughput and predictive in vitro platform for nephrotoxicity prediction. They also develop and manage the HPA Platform and ImmunoAtlas portal to promotes open science and collaborations that can accelerate the adoptions of phenotypic profiling and/or multiplex IHC technologies in immuno-oncology.

Group Members

Scientist	ZHONG Guorui
Lead Research Officer I	LEE Jia Ying Joey
Senior Research Officer I	KONG Jia Wen Carmen
PhD Student	YEO Chyi Maey Claresta

CHIAM Keng Hwee  Senior Principal Investigator Email: chiamkh@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Biophysical Modelling

Chiam Keng Hwee is a theorist working at the interface of physics and biology, collaborating very closely with experimental groups in developing theories and models for a variety of problems in mechanobiology and biological physics, systems biology, and biological fluid mechanics. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 2003 and his B.S.E. in physics from the University of Michigan in 1997.

Research Interests

Keng Hwee's group uses a combination of biophysical and bioinformatics tools to study cell migration. Cell migration is a critical process in every living organism, central to, for example, the morphogenesis of embryos, formation of tissues and organs, wound repair, as well as in less welcoming scenarios such as cancer metastasis. Some of their current projects include the study of amoeboid modes of cancer cell invasion, collective modes of epithelial cell sheet migration, and swimming and swarming modes of bacterial cell motility.

He hopes that their approach will enable them to identify potential targets to perturb cell migration, which can eventually be translated into drugs to stop cancer cell invasion, promote wound and skin healing, or stop the aggregation of bacterial cells into biofilms.

Group Members

Senior Research Officer I	ZHOU Tianxun
Senior Research Officer I	GOH Jie Hui Corinna

LEE Hwee Kuan (Head) Deputy Director (Training and Talent), Senior Principal Investigator Email: leehk@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Computer Vision and Pattern Discovery

Lee Hwee Kuan is a Senior Principal Investigator of the Imaging Informatics division in Bioinformatics Institute. His current research work involves developing of computer vision aglorithms for clinical and biological studies. Hwee Kuan obtained his Ph.D. in 2001 in Theoretical Physics from Carnegie Mellon University with a thesis on liquid-liquid phase transitions and quasicrystals. He then held a joint postdoctoral position with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA) and University of Georgia where he worked on developing advanced Monte Carlo methods and nano-magnetism. In 2003, with an award from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science, Hwee Kuan moved to Tokyo Metropolitan University where he developed solutions to extremely long time scaled problems and a reweighting method for nonequilibrium systems. In 2005 he returned home to join Data Storage Institute, investigating novel recording methods such as hard disk recording via magnetic resonance. In 2006, he joined Bioinformatics Institute as a Principle Investigator in the Imaging Informatics Division.

Research Interests

Lee Hwee Kuan’s current research focuses on for analysis of tissues, histological and cellular images. These images are obtained from light microscopy, including image data sets from high-throughput screens.

Group Members

Scientist	CHENG Zi Yi, Nicholas
Senior Scientist II	LIU Wei
Senior Scientist I	SINGH Malay
Scientist	MENG Zhenyu
Scientist	TAN Wei Ping Eddy
Collaborator	PARK Sojeong
Senior Research Officer	LIN Li
Research Officer	COPPOLA Davide
Research Officer	ZHANG Tianyi
PhD Student	CHEN Brian
PhD Student	REN Yu Jerome

WOO Xing Yi  Head of Research Data Integration Email: woo_xing_yi@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Research Data Integration

Xing Yi Woo obtained her PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Joint-PhD program of University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and National University of Singapore. She did her postdoctoral fellowship in the Genome Institute of Singapore under the mentorship of Professors Edison Liu and Guillaume Bourque. Subsequently, she joined The Jackson Laboratory as a computational scientist and made significant contributions in a wide range of computational projects, including analysis pipeline development, clinical curation and downstream analysis of large-scale datasets of cancer and patient-derived xenografts. She has led analysis projects in cancer resources and consortiums, and contributed to publications in high impact journals, including Nature Genetics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cancer Research and Genome Research.

Group Member

Assistant Principal Investigator	LAU Mai Chan
Senior Scientist I	GOH Jia Ni Janice
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	WONG Wai Yee
Research Officer	PHUA Xuan Ming Brandon
Senior Research Officer	ZHANG Qinze Arthur

WONG Wing Cheong  Head of BioMedical Data Architecture & Repository Email: wongwc@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: BioMedical Data Architecture & Repository

Wong Wing Cheong received his undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from NTU. He joined A*STAR under the joint MSc in Bioinformatics from A*STAR/NUS and subsequently completed his Dr. Rer. Nat (suma cum laude) in Computer Science from Leipzig University. He has been a Principal Investigator with BII since 2014 and is currently the Head/Principal Investigator of the BioMed DAR group since 2019.

Group Members

Assistant Principal Investigator	TAN Ming Zhen
Project Manager	FUN Max
Senior Research Officer II	LIM Aloysius
Research Officer	KOH Ziying
Research Officer	DONG Jiahui

 

TAN Ming Zhen  Assistant Principal Investigator Email: tan_ming_zhen@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: BioMedical Data Architecture & Repository

Dr Tan Ming Zhen graduated from the National University of Singapore in 2012 with a B.Eng. (Hons) and B.Soc.Sci (Hons). He then moved on to the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences to pursue his PhD in Engineering, which he obtained in 2017. During his PhD, he worked on several research projects involving mathematical modelling, image processing, and statistics. After completing his PhD, he joined a local FinTech start-up as the Head of Technology, developing the code base for passive investment. In 2021, Dr Tan Ming Zhen joined the Bioinformatics Institute as Assistant Principal Investigator, where he is currently researching data management support and privacy-protection technologies.

Research Interests

Dr Tan has previously worked on the diffeomorphic metric mapping of brain surfaces and volumes, as well as keeping a real-time dashboard for manipulating datasets, visual data exploration tools, and implementing statistical tests. His current area of study is synthetic data and its potential use as a privacy-protection tool. More specifically, he is researching methods for generating high-fidelity synthetic data from real-world data sets, and hopes to improve their potential as surrogates for code development and research.

Group Members

Head of BioMedical Data Architecture & Repository	WONG Wing Cheong
Project Manager	FUN Max
Senior Research Officer II	LIM Aloysius
Research Officer	KOH Ziying
Research Officer	DONG Jiahui

 

KARNANI  Neerja  Head of Clinical Data Engagement, Senior Principal Investigator Email: neerja_karnani@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Clinical Data Engagement

Karnani Neerja is a molecular epidemiologist and clinical data scientist with 20 years of experience working with academia, industry and national platforms. She started her research career at University of Virginia, USA, where she contributed to the first functional annotation draft of the human genome (ENCODE consortium). She moved to Singapore in 2013 to join A* STAR’s Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (SICS). As the Systems Biology lead at SICS, she developed the multi-omics roadmap for Singapore’s National Birth (GUSTO) and Pre-conception (S-PRESTO) cohorts and identified biomarkers of metabolic and mental health adversities in expecting mothers and their offspring. These findings have been patented and licensed by prominent nutrition industries and are being translated into future interventions. She has also contributed to the research landscape and scientific vision of these cohorts by serving on their executive committees for over 6 years. Beyond the developmental and pregnancy cohorts, she is involved in Singapore National Precision Medicine (NPM) program’s SG10K-Health study and serves on its science and data access committees. To advance her interest in population health analysis and to connect it with the real-world data, she joined A*STAR’s Bioinformatics Institute (BII) in April 2021 as the Head of Clinical Data Engagement. Her team is developing omics based nextgen mobile applications that can provide patient health journey and actionable intervention roadmap for clinicians. Her contributions to the biomedical informatics field were recently highlighted by GovInsider in its special report on ‘Women in GovTech 2021’.

Group Members

BII Team
Senior Research Fellow	LIM Ives Yubin
Full Stack Developer	HUAN Jason
Research Officer	CHAN Penny
Data analysts under joint appointment @SICS
Senior Research Fellow	GONG Min
Senior Research Fellow	XU Jia
Research Officer	TIN Felicia
Project Manager	ONG Kelly

LAU Mai Chan  Assistant Principal Investigator Email: Lau_Mai_Chan@bii.a-star.edu.sg Research Group: Spatial & Single-cell Omics Immunology

Mai Chan Lau earned her PhD from the National University of Singapore in 2015, focusing on high-performance GPU research. During her postdoctoral work at Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN, A*STAR), she made significant contributions to important immune studies, leveraging her expertise in single-cell bioinformatics. This experience sparked her interest in exploring new aspects of tumor-immune heterogeneity in the tumor microenvironment (TME). Motivated by the potential clinical impact of addressing these questions, Mai Chan joined Prof. Shuji Ogino's laboratory at Harvard Medical School in the United States in 2018. There, she delved into studying tumor-immune interactions in the tissue space through the analysis of histological H&E and multiplexed immunofluorescence images. Her novel spatial analysis method, “Tumor-Immune Partitioning and Clustering (TIPC)”, earned her the Poster of Distinction at the 2019 Harvard Medical School Pathology Retreat. It also resulted in a provisional patent coversheet. In 2021, she returned to Singapore and joined Dr. Joe Yeong's laboratory at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB, A*STAR). There, she expanded her research to include spatial transcriptomics in the field of spatial immunology. In 2022, she established her own lab, called "Spatial & Single-cell Omics Immunology," at the Bioinformatics Institute (BII, A*STAR), while also overseeing the Computational Immunology Platform at SIgN (A*STAR). Mai Chan's contributions to AI-based biomedical research have gained recognition both locally and internationally. She has served as a program committee member for Clinical Translation of Medical Image Computing & Computer-Assisted Intervention in consecutive years, 2022 and 2023. Additionally, she holds an editorial board position for the World Scientific Annual Review of Cancer Immunology journal.

GROUP MEMBERS

Research Officer	HO Zheng Yi
Intern	ZHANG Marcia Qiao Yan
Intern	FENG Xinyun