Principal Investigators

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

Dr 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

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	NG Tze Yang Justin
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	MENG Zengyu
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

Dr. 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. The broad goal of Fan Lab is to develop computational techniques for modeling protein-ligand interactions, and to apply the developed methods in applications including:

• Drug Development
• Discovery of new ingredients for Food and Nutrition
• In-silico toxicity prediction for chemical and food ingredient safety
• Synthetic biology and biocatalysis for synthesis of pharmaceuticals
• AI-guided drug discovery and lead optimization

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 Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	VERMA Ravi Kumar
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (Collaborator)	LIN Fu
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	KRISHNA Deepak
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	JALADANKI Chaitanya Kumar
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	SUPEKAR Shreyas
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (Collaborator)	HARTONO Yossa Dwi
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	WEI Wan
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	MASIREVIC Srdan
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
ARAP 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

Following his graduation in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford in 2001, Peter moved to the LMB to read for a DPhil, supported by a Wellcome Trust Prize Studentship. He was awarded an EMBO Long-Term Fellowship to carry out research at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt from 2008. In 2010, he became a Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, before moving to BII as Principal Investigator in late 2013, where he established the Multiscale Simulation, Modeling and Design group.

The group develops computational models that integrate diverse biophysical and biochemical data to resolve the dynamics of biomolecules over multiple time and length scales, focusing particularly on mechanisms of infectious disease, the host immune response to pathogens, and ultimately, therapeutic intervention strategies. Recent research highlights in the structural virology field include the development of a “virtual dengue virus” as part of an MOE Tier 3 consortium, which is now being extended towards new rational approaches for vaccine and antibody design, funded by an NRF CRP grant.

Recent progress has also been made in the area of bacterial pathogenesis, via the discovery of previously undisclosed natural defense and antiseptic mechanisms in wound healing, which may be leveraged to develop new ways to fight infections and inflammatory diseases. Peter currently has >130 publications (H-index 40, >5000 citations), including work reported recently in e.g. Nature Communications, Science Translational Medicine, and Cell Metabolism.

Group Members

Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	KRAH Alexander
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	MARZINEK Jan
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	SAMSUDIN Mohd Firdaus
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	PALUR Venkata Raghuvamsi
PhD Students	WALLER Callum Peter
PhD Students	DAVIES Thomas Stefan
PhD Students	TUPINA Dagnija

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 research 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. Since 2014, he is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore. 

Group Members

Research Scientist	TAN Zhen Wah
Research Scientist	SU Tran-to Chinh
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	TEE Wei Ven
Research Officer	LIM Sylvester
PhD Student	AMANGELDINA Aidana
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	DONG Bingxue

VERMA Chandra S. (Head) Deputy Director (Research), Senior Principal Investigator 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.

Group Members

Senior Research Scientist	NGUYEN Ngoc Minh
Senior Research Scientist	SRINIVASARAGHAVAN Kannan
Research Scientist	LI Jianguo
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	ARONICA Pietro
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	MALIK Ashar
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	KUMAR Akshita
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	KHARE Shruti Vijay
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	SHIVGAN Aishwary
PhD Student	COWAN Megan, ARAP (Univ Essex)
PhD Student	STAMATIS Dimitrios, ARAP (Univ Southampton)
PhD Student	NICOLAOU Sonia, ARAP (Univ Manchester)
PhD Student	STUCHFIELD Dale, ARAP (Univ Manchester)
PhD Student	MHOUMADI Yasmina, SINGA

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).

Research Interests

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

Senior Research Officer

CHANNARAYAPATNA SRINIVASA Arvind

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

Dr. Yu Weimiao is an image processing and AI/ML expert in bioimage informatics and computational digital pathology diagnosis. He is currently a joint Principle 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, majoring in image processing and machine vision. He joined the Bioinformatics Institute of Agency of Science, Technology, and Research(A*STAR) in 2007 and moved his research position to the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) in 2010. He is currently leading Computational Digital Pathology Lab in BII and Computational & Molecular Pathology Lab (CMPL) in IMCB to deepen and extend the R&D with clinical and industrial partners. 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, i.e., diagnosis and prognosis. His teams have more than 14 years of experience designing and fast prototyping robust cellular image analysis and molecule diagnosis solutions. 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. The goal is to provide efficient, economic, accurate, and robust digital pathology algorithms for patients/clinicians and improve healthcare for the public.

Dr. Yu is not only active in academic research; he is also an entrepreneur. To enhance the application of machine learning and AI in clinical diagnosis/prognosis, 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. His team provides intelligent and quantitative imaging analysis solutions for clinical pathology images for diagnostic and prognostic purposes. In general, it includes the following three solutions: i). ImmunoHistoChemistry (IHC) and Immunofluorescence (IF); ii). Hematoxylin&Eosin (H&E) and iii). Multiplex Fluorescence (MF) stained images. The automatic processing of integrated imaging modalities will provide more comprehensive information for clinicians making better decisions for patients. Such a platform allows the researchers, clinicians, and pharma to profile the patient immune signature for diagnosis, prognosis and drug response study, etc.

The joint lab of excellence is parked at A*STAR Research Support Center: 

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

Group Members

Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	ONG Kok Haur
Senior Research Officer	MARINI Gabriel Pik Liang
Research Officer	HUO Xinmi
Research Officer	LI Longjie

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. 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

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	ZHONG Guorui
Senior Research Officer	LEE Jia Ying Joey
Research Officer	FU Shufeng Oscar
Research Officer	KONG Jia Wen Carmen

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

Research Officer	GOH Jie Hui Corinna
Research Officer	ZHOU Tianxun
PhD Student	JUN Myeongjun

LEE Hwee Kuan (Head) Deputy Director (Talent & Training), 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 algorithms 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

Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	CHENG Zi Yi, Nicholas
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	LIU Wei
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	PAKNEZHAD Mahsa
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	SINGH Malay
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	TAN Wei Ping Eddy
Research Officer	LIN Li
Research Officer	D/O RANJIT SINGH Kavita Kaur
PhD Student	CHEN Brian
PhD Student	CHEONG Jiasheng Isaac
PhD Student	COPPOLA Davide
PhD Student	PARK Sojeong

WOO Xing Yi  Senior Principal Investigator 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

Senior Principal Investigator	WOO Xing Yi
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	WONG Wai Yee
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	PHUA Xuan Ming Brandon
Senior Post-Doctoral Research Fellow	LAU Mai Chan

 

WONG Wing Cheong  Senior Principal Investigator 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

Senior Principal Investigator	WONG Wing Cheong
Assistant Principal Investigator	TAN Ming Zhen
Software Engineering Manager	TAY Wei Hong
Project Manager	FUN Max
Software Developer	LIM Aloysius
Software Developer	KOH Ziying

 

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 Scientist	CHOO Matthew
Senior Research Fellow	LIM Ives Yubin
Full Stack Developer	HUAN Jason
Research Officer	CHAN Penny
Data analysts under joint appointment @SICS
Research Scientist	VAZ Candida
Senior Research Fellow	XU Jia
Research Fellow	MISHRA Priti
Project Manager	ONG Kelly