OUR PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS

Presented with the opportunities to access developmental cohorts strategically positions Cai to study infant sleep alongside subsequent developmental stage outcomes such as cognition, mood, behaviours, growth, adiposity and cardio-metabolic health. Aside from infant sleep, she also has a keen interest in multidisciplinary research, linking psychology and neuroscience with metabolic conditions such as gestational diabetes.

She won A*STAR IHDP's Emerging PI award in 2019, Best Poster award at the 8^th World Congress on Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) in 2013, and the Young Investigator Award (Clinical) at the University Obstetrics and Gynaecology Congress in 2012.

Cai received her PhD from the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

Find out more about her here.

PUBLICATIONS

• Maternal hyperglycemia in singleton pregnancies conceived by IVF may be modified by first-trimester BMI.
  Hum Reprod. 2017 Sep 1;32(9):1941-1947. doi: 10.1093/humrep/dex243.

• Sleep Quality and Nocturnal Sleep Duration in Pregnancy and Risk of Gestational Diabetes Mellitus.
  Sleep. 2017 Feb 1;40(2). doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsw058.

• The Influence of Gestational Diabetes on Neurodevelopment of Children in the First Two Years of Life: A Prospective Study.
  PLoS One. 2016 Sep 7;11(9):e0162113. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0162113. eCollection 2016. 
  

Chen Luxi is a Senior Scientist with the Social Sciences department under A*STAR IHDP's Human Development domain. She was previously a research fellow with the National University of Singapore. 

Her research interests lie in developmental psychology and applied psychology, with a focus on child development, self-regulation, family processes, stress mindset and coping, and mental health. Notable projects she has been involved in include the Singapore Longitudinal Early Development Study (SG-LEADS) where she the study team investigated how child-, parent-, family-, school-, and community-level factors contribute to children's development across multiple domains (cognitive, socioemotional, behavioural, academic, physical, and mental health), as well as maternal wellness and family functioning in Singapore; the Modelling and Optimising Homecare and Caregiving Services for the Elderly (HOCAMOSE) project that is focused on improving the efficiency and quality of homecare and caregiving services for the elderly through data-driven modeling and optimisation, with the goal of enhancing older adults' physical and psychological well-being; and the Role-play Intervention Programme to Improve Theory-of-Mind among Preschoolers in Singapore, which developed and implemented a role-play intervention aimed at enhancing preschoolers' theory-of-mind development, while examining the role of executive functions and teacher coaching in fostering children's social-emotional understanding.

Chen obtained her BSc in Psychology from the Beijing Normal University her Master of Counselling from Monash University, and her PhD in Psychology from the Nanyang Technological University.

Find out more about her here.

PUBLICATIONS

• Delayed gratification predicts behavioral and academic outcomes: Examining the validity of the delay-of-gratification choice paradigm in Singaporean young children.
  Applied Developmental Science. 22 Feb 2024. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2024.2307366.
  

• Pre-pandemic family resources and child self-regulation in children’s internalizing problems during COVID-19: A multi-level social-ecological framework for emotional resilience.
  Front Psychol. 2023 Jul 26:14:1203524. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1203524. eCollection 2023.
  

• Self-regulation and academic achievement among Singaporean young children: A cross-cultural comparison in a multicultural Asian society.
  International Journal of Behavioral Development, 47(4), 339–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/01650254231170442

Chen Xuejiao is a Senior Scientist with the Social Sciences department under A*STAR IHDP's Human Development domain. She was previously a research fellow with the National University of Singapore. 

Her research interests focus on early childhood development and family well-being. She employs quantitative methods such as structural equation modeling, fixed effects modeling, and propensity score analysis to evaluate how environmental factors like family background, food insecurity, and COVID-19, affect young children’s test scores, behaviour problems, and physical health.

Chen has been involved in the Singapore Longitudinal Early Development Study (SG-LEADS) since its first wave. The study collects data from 5,005 Singaporean children aged six and below at baseline, and follows the same children over time. She has contributed to the sample design, questionnaire design, survey operation, and the construction of sampling weights and norms for test scores.

She received her PhD from the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore.

Find out more about her here.

PUBLICATIONS

• COVID-19 Experiences and Family Resilience: A Latent Class Analysis.
  Journal of Family and Marriage. 3 September 2024. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.13031.
  

• Achievement gaps before school in Singapore: Family SES, parental values and young children's self-regulation.
  Early Childhood Research Quarterly. 2023. Oct (65): 352-62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2023.07.012.
  

• How food insecurity affects children’s behavior problems in early childhood: The nutrition and family stress pathways.
  Plos one. 2024. Jan 3 (19):e0294109. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294109.

Molly Grant is a Scientist with A*STAR IHDP's Human Development domain. She was previously a Research Fellow for the Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families and Children at the Victoria University of Wellington.

Her research interests lie in child and adolescent development, family life, social and economic factors, and longitudinal research. Her doctoral research used a life course framework to examine social and economic circumstances across childhood and children’s health and development. The use of longitudinal analytic techniques in this research meant the duration and timing of childhood experiences could be considered together, giving direction for policy interventions and family support strategies.

Grant has prior working experience in the School of Population Health at the University of Auckland as part of the research team at the Growing Up in New Zealand (GUiNZ) birth cohort study. GUiNZ is the largest contemporary study of child development in New Zealand and follows the lives of more than 6,000 children and their families longitudinally. 

Much of her research to date has focused on material hardship – a key indicator of poverty. She has also worked as a Research Fellow for the Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families and Children at the Victoria University of Wellington, identifying key interventions that target the reduction of material hardship in the short- to medium-term. 

Grant obtained both her Master and PhD in Education from the University of Auckland.

Find out more about her here.

PUBLICATIONS

• Evaluating the long-term effects of income assistance for material hardship among families with children. SSM-Population Health.
  SSM Popul Health. 2024 Jul 21:27:101700. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2024.101700. eCollection 2024 Sep.

• Examining approaches to material hardship classification: Cross-sectional and longitudinal perspectives.
  Social Sciences & Humanities Open. 2024 Jan 1;10:100931. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2024.100931.
  

• Promoting Temporal Investigations of Development in Context: A Systematic Review of Longitudinal Research Linking Childhood Circumstances and Learning-related Outcomes.
  Educ Psychol Rev 35, 19 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09734-4.
  

Lu Shuya is a Scientist with the Social Sciences department under A*STAR IHDP's Human Development domain. She was previously a research fellow with the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

Her research interests focus on family, migration and child development. Lu has been involved in the Singapore Longitudinal Early Development Study (SG-LEADS). Collecting data from 5,005 Singaporean children aged six and below at baseline and following the same children over time, the study investigates how child-, parent-, family-, school-, and community-level factors contribute to children's development across multiple domains (cognitive, socioemotional, behavioural, academic, physical, and mental health), as well as maternal wellness and family functioning in Singapore.

Lu obtained her BA in Sociology, Education and MA in Social Sciences from the University of California, Irvine; and her PhD in Sociology from the National University of Singapore. 

Find out more about her here.

PUBLICATIONS

• The Rise in Cross-national Marriages and the Emergent Inequalities in East and Southeast Asia. 
  Sociology Compass. 13 May 2024. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13219.

• Family Dynamics in Cross-national Families with Young Children in Singapore.
  Journal of Family Issue. Volume 45, Issue 5. First published online February 10, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X23115667.
  
  

Kristy Lee is a Scientist with the Social Sciences department under A*STAR IHDP's Human Development domain. Prior to joining A*STAR, Lee completed her postdoctoral training as a research fellow at the Centre for Holistic Initiatives for Learning and Development (CHILD) and thereafter as a research fellow with the Human Potential Translational Research Programme at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

Lee’s research interests lie in child development, sociomoral cognition, and social inequalities. During graduate school, she led several experimental studies on early prosociality, including investigations into preschool children’s norm enforcement, helping, and resource distribution, as well as observational studies on early-emerging racial biases. Lee is presently part of the research team for the Singapore Longitudinal EArly Development Study (SG-LEADS) led by Professor Jean Yeung. Her current research focuses on the longitudinal impact of non-parental care on children’s achievement and socioemotional adjustment.

Lee obtained her Bachelor of Social Sciences (Hons) in Psychology from the National University of Singapore, and her PhD in Developmental Psychology from Nanyang Technological University.

PUBLICATIONS

• Early Prosociality is conditional on opportunity cost and familiarity with the target.
  Evol. Hum. Behav. 2023. Jan (44): 39–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2022.10.003.
  

• The developmental trajectories of racial categorization and explicit racial biases in Singapore.
  Acta Psychol. 2022. Sep (229): 103694. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103694.

• Preschoolers Favor Their Ingroup When Resources Are Limited.
  Front. Psychol. 2018. Sep (9): 1752. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01752.
  

Chen Li's research interests lie in genetics, DNA methylation analysis, lipidomics, metabolomics, gene expression analysis, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), copy number variation analysis, next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis and clinical data analysis. In particular, she focuses on the multi-omics studies of gestational diabetes-related research, homocysteine pathway, and telomere length.

Her scientific work includes the pre-processing of genetics, DNA methylation andlipidomics data in the GUSTO and S-PRESTO birth cohort studies – making them ready for multi-omics analysis; and genome-wide association studies of numerous plasma micronutrients such as vitamins B12 and D and homocysteine, and clinical biomarkers like insulin-like growth factors (IGF), insulin-like growth factor-binding proteins (IGFBP), adiponectin, leptin and C-reactive protein (CRP).

Chen obtained her bachelor and master's degrees in engineering from Tianjin University, and her PhD from the National University of Singapore.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Analysis of two birth tissues provides new insights into the epigenetic landscape of neonates born preterm.
  Clin Epigenetics. 2019 Feb 11;11(1):26. doi: 10.1186/s13148-018-0599-4.

• The early care environment and DNA methylome variation in childhood.
  Dev Psychopathol. 2018 Aug;30(3):891-903. doi: 10.1017/S0954579418000627.

• DNA methylome variation in a perinatal nurse-visitation program that reduces child maltreatment: a 27-year follow-up.
  Transl Psychiatry 8, 15 (2018). doi: 10.1038/s41398-017-0063-9.
  

Michelle Kee’s research focuses on antenatal maternal well-being, maternal childhood adversity and parenting styles.

Using data from two multi-ethnic, ongoing longitudinal cohorts in Singapore – one when mothers were recruited during mid-pregnancy stage (GUSTO) and the other involved women recruited during preconception phase (S-PRESTO) – she aims to understand how gene-by-parental-care (or “gene-by-environmental”) interactions predict neurodevelopmental and socio-emotional outcomes in the offspring.

The key projects she’s involved in look into understanding maternal well-being and parenting styles on a child's cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes; and studying how genetic profile scores of psychiatric disorders, traits and susceptibility associates with maternal parenting styles, well-being and a child's outcomes. She’s also leading the Mapping Antenatal Maternal Stress (MAMS) study, where she and her team aim to build a biologically informed prediction model of maternal well-being.

Kee obtained her Bachelor of Science from Nanyang Technological University and her PhD in Integrated Biology and Medicine from Duke-NUS Medical School.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Positive maternal mental health during pregnancy associated with specific forms of adaptive development in early childhood: Evidence from a longitudinal study.
  Dev Psychopathol. 2017 Dec;29(5):1573-1587. doi: 10.1017/S0954579417001249.
  

Wong Chun Hong is a Scientist with A*STAR IHDP's Human Development domain. He was previously a research fellow at the National University of Singapore's Global Asia Institute, working on shelf-life extension of tropical fruits in the Southeast Asia region.

His research interests now lie in micronutrient supplementation for pregnancy in high-income countries, specifically on how supplementation at different stages of pregnancy can help mitigate the risks of adverse maternal and infant outcomes. Wong was one of the reviewers for a systematic review and meta-analysis on looking at maternal dietary patterns in relation to birth outcomes.

Wong obtained both his BSc and PhD in Food, Science and Technology, from the National University of Singapore. 

Find out more about him here.

PUBLICATIONS

• Comparison of two strategies enhancing the antagonistic effect of lactic acid bacteria in edible coating against Listeria monocytogenes on fresh-cut apple slices.
  LWT. 2023. June (182): 114923. 28 May 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lwt.2023.114923.

• Bilayer edible coating with stabilized Lactobacillus plantarum 299v improved the shelf life and safety quality of fresh-cut apple slices. 
  Food Packaging and Shelf Life. 20 August 2021. Dec (30): 1000746. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fpsl.2021.100746.
  
  

Professor Johan Eriksson is the Executive Director and Programme Director for Human Development at A*STAR IHDP, and Director of the Human Potential Translational Research Programme at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. A specialist in internal medicine and general practice, Professor Eriksson was last full professor at the faculty of medicine, University of Helsinki, and chief physician at Helsinki University Central Hospital in Finland. He holds clinical interests in diabetes and related metabolic diseases.

His research focuses on the early programming of health and disease, as well as on the prevention of type 2 diabetes and related metabolic outcomes by lifestyle interventions. He is in charge of the Helsinki Birth Cohort Study, a unique birth cohort study with a follow-up of over 20,000 individuals from birth until the age of over 80 years. Furthermore, he has been involved in the gestational diabetes prevention study RADIEL, in which a lifestyle intervention was shown to successfully reduce gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM); and the Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study (DPS) – the first randomised study to show that lifestyle intervention is effective in the prevention of type 2 diabetes.

Professor Eriksson received his medical degree and specialist qualifications from the University of Helsinki.

Find out more about him here.

In addition to her role at A*STAR IHDP, Neerja Karnani is also the Head of Clinical Data Engagement at A*STAR's Bioinformatics Institute. Her postdoctoral work at the University of Virginia, in association with the ENCODE consortium (NHGRI) involved understanding the epigenetic landscape and instability in human genome.

Her research work is focused on identifying diagnostic markers and interventions related to women and child health adversities. She uses multi-omics approaches (genetics, epigenetics, transcriptomics, metagenomics and lipidomics) and integrates big data to develop better molecular insights into metabolic diseases, micronutrient deficiencies, and mental health adversities.

Besides helming the systems biology and biomarker research group at SICS, Karnani is also an executive committee member of the GUSTO and S-PRESTO birth cohorts, a part of the science management group for EpiGen consortium – a collaboration between Singapore, New Zealand and the U.K. – and a key member and contributor of Singapore’s National Precision Medicine programme that aims to study human genetic variation for population stratified risk prediction of health adversities. Her group’s research findings have attracted major nutrition, pharma and diagnostic industries and fostered translational programmes.

Karnani received her PhD from the School of Life Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, where she worked on multidrug resistance in pathogenic yeast. During her graduate studies, she was a recipient of the C. R. Krishna Murti Memorial Young Scientist Award.

Find out more about her here.

PUBLICATIONS

• Mitochondrial oxidative capacity and NAD+ biosynthesis are reduced in human sarcopenia across ethnicities.
  Nat Commun. 2019 Dec 20;10(1):5808. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-13694-1.

• Determinants of intramyocellular lipid accumulation in early childhood.
  Int J Obes (Lond). 2019 Aug 28. doi: 10.1038/s41366-019-0435-8. [Epub ahead of print].

• Analysis of two birth tissues provides new insights into the epigenetic landscape of neonates born preterm.
  Clin Epigenetics. 2019 Feb 11;11(1):26. doi: 10.1186/s13148-018-0599-4.

A senior principal investigator with A*STAR IHDP, Professor Koh Woon Puay is also Assistant Dean for Faculty Development at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, lead investigator for the Healthy Longevity Translational Research Programme at NUS Medicine, and Director of the Clinician-Scientist Development Unit at NUS Medicine.

Being a population health scientist, her research interest and expertise is in unravelling the epidemiology of chronic diseases of importance to Singapore and the world at large, such as cancer, cardio-metabolic, musculoskeletal and neurodegenerative diseases. Being medically qualified in Singapore, and having had PhD training in experimental research and postdoctoral training in epidemiology, she seeks to integrate biology, medicine and epidemiology in etiological studies of the aforementioned chronic diseases.

Koh’s research incorporates her knowledge in clinical medicine and training in laboratory science with epidemiologic methods to unravel putative mechanistic pathways in disease etiology. Beyond establishing associations between exposures and risk of disease, her research uses molecular and genetic tools to identify modifiable factors (such as lifestyle factors) that could be applicable to disease prevention, or biomarkers (including but not limited to genetic markers) that could be developed for early detection or screening of disease. In addition to bringing benefit to the scientific community, she also aims to translate her research into public health outcomes by providing evidence for the foundation of public health education and policy in Singapore.

Since 2003, Koh has been the principal investigator of The Singapore Chinese Health Study. Together with local and overseas co-investigators, she has examined lifestyle and dietary factors associated with chronic diseases common among Singaporeans using this cohort, and has co-authored about 400 scientific papers in peer-reviewed international journals, including several noteworthy and novel scientific contributions of reports on dietary, genetic and lifestyle factors that are of importance to Asian populations. The Singapore Chinese Health Study is an example of world-class epidemiologic research that integrates rigorous prospective study design with cutting-edge biochemical measures that provide better information for causal inference. The study represents a unique constellation of strengths highlighting the importance of Singapore as a hub for biomedical research: a well-defined motivated study population leading to low non-response and nearly complete follow-up, strong expertise in epidemiology and biochemical measurements, and an Asian setting that importantly complements studies conducted in western countries.

For her groundbreaking research efforts, the Ministry of Health, Singapore awarded her the NMRC Clinician Scientist Award (Senior Investigator Category) for the years 2014 to 2019 and 2020 to 2025. In 2016, she received the Duke-NUS Medical School Dean’s Excellence Award 2016 for outstanding accomplishment in research.

Koh obtained her MBBS from the National University of Singapore and her PhD in Immunology from The University of Sydney.


PUBLICATIONS

• Consumption of dietary nuts in midlife and risk of cognitive impairment in late-life: the Singapore Chinese Health Study.
  Age Ageing. 2021 Jun 28;50(4):1215-1221. doi: 10.1093/ageing/afaa267.

• Healthful dietary patterns and risk of end-stage kidney disease: the Singapore Chinese Health Study.
  Am J Clin Nutr. 2021 Mar 11;113(3):675-683. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/nqaa348.

• Association Between Dietary Patterns in Midlife and Healthy Ageing in Chinese Adults: The Singapore Chinese Health Study.
  J Am Med Dir Assoc. 2021 Jun;22(6):1279-1286. doi: 10.1016/j.jamda.2020.09.045. Epub 2020 Nov 18.

Melvin Leow is a senior principal investigator at A*STAR IHDP; the Director of the Clinical Nutrition Research Centre (CNRC), which is part of A*STAR's Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation (SIFBI); a professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine; an adjunct professor at Duke-NUS Medical School; and a senior consultant endocrinologist affiliated to the Department of Endocrinology at Tan Tock Seng Hospital.

Leow's scientific work focuses on energy metabolism and metabolic physiology, in particular understanding the control over energy balance, neuroendocrine function and metabolism that is exerted through the critical centres of the brain and feedback loops involving the intricate network of the gastrointestinal tract, pancreas, adipose tissue, liver and skeletal muscles.

His research interests include looking into the metabolic effects of the thyroid hormone, brown adipose tissue and browning of white fat, mathematical modelling of endocrine physiology, functional foods and nutraceuticals as interventions for obesity, diabetes, ageing and cancer. Notably, he has done significant research on brown adipose tissue, thermogenesis and the browning of white adipocytes with nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals and endogenous peptides and hormones.

Leow received his MBBS and MMed from the National University of Singapore, and obtained his PhD from the Nanyang Technological University.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Brown Adipose Tissue: Multimodality Evaluation by PET, MRI, Infrared Thermography, and Whole-Body Calorimetry (TACTICAL-II).
  Obesity (Silver Spring). 2019 Sep;27(9):1434-1442. doi: 10.1002/oby.22560. Epub 2019 Jul 13.

• A new method of infrared thermography for quantification of brown adipose tissue activation in healthy adults (TACTICAL): a randomized trial.
  J Physiol Sci. 2017 May;67(3):395-406. doi: 10.1007/s12576-016-0472-1. Epub 2016 Jul 21.

• Desensitization and Incomplete Recovery of Hepatic Target Genes After Chronic Thyroid Hormone Treatment and Withdrawal in Male Adult Mice.
  Endocrinology. 2016 Apr;157(4):1660-72. doi: 10.1210/en.2015-1848. Epub 2016 Feb 11.

In addition to her role at A*STAR IHDP, Evelyn Loo is also an adjunct assistant professor at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine’s Department of Paediatrics.

Her research interests include examining environmental influences during the early years of one’s life – such as nutrition, microbiome and exogenous stressors – that affect epigenetic plasticity and immunological maturation during development. Loo’s work revolves around the study of epidemiology of a child’s health as well as identifying critical periods where environmental microbiome can exert the most influence, identifying factors that can affect environmental microbiome, and understanding the interactions between environmental microbiome and allergens, with outcomes on the skin microbiome and the subsequent development of non-communicable diseases. She hopes that her research will be useful in the implementation of strategies to prevent childhood diseases. 

Loo was awarded the Open Fund – Young Individual Research Grant by the National Medical Research Council to lead a project that looked into identifying the effects of household environmental microbiome in early life on development of allergic diseases in children.

Before joining SICS, Loo was a postdoctoral fellow at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine’s Department of Paediatrics where she studied the epidemiology of allergic diseases in children. She now continues her research in the field of developmental origins of health and disease at SICS with the GUSTO and S-PRESTO birth cohort studies.

She obtained her PhD in biomedical sciences from the National University of Singapore through the NUS research scholarship.

PUBLICATIONS

• Comparison of microbiota and allergen profile in house dust from homes of allergic and non-allergic subjects- results from the GUSTO study.
  World Allergy Organ J. 2018 Dec 5;11(1):37. doi: 10.1186/s40413-018-0212-5. eCollection 2018.

• Associations between maternal vitamin D levels during pregnancy and allergic outcomes in the offspring in the first 5 years of life.
  Pediatr Allergy Immunol. 2019 Feb;30(1):117-122. doi: 10.1111/pai.12995. Epub 2018 Nov 20.

• Effects of infant weight gain on subsequent allergic outcomes in the first 3 years of life.
  BMC Pediatr. 2017 Jun 2;17(1):134. doi: 10.1186/s12887-017-0890-0.

• A 1-year randomized controlled trial of a nutritional blend to improve nutritional biomarkers and prevent cognitive decline among community-dwelling older adults: The Nolan Study.
  Alzheimers Dement (N Y). 2022 Sep 28;8(1):e12314. doi: 10.1002/trc2.12314. eCollection 2022.

• A Decentralized Study Setup Enables to Quantify the Effect of Polymerization and Linkage of α-Glucans on Post-Prandial Glucose Response.
  Nutrients. 2022 Mar 7;14(5):1123. doi: 10.3390/nu14051123.

• A blood-based nutritional risk index explains cognitive enhancement and decline in the multidomain Alzheimer prevention trial.
  Alzheimers Dement (N Y). 2019 Dec 28;5:953-963. doi: 10.1016/j.trci.2019.11.004. eCollection 2019.

Lucas Shen’s research at A*STAR IHDP involves leading data-intensive quantitative research on the interactions between the family environment (e.g. paternal vs maternal factors) and the broader environment (neighbourhood social, urban, and built environment) on early childhood development (physical, social, and mental well-being).

His key projects harmonise and link geospatiotemporal data with cohort studies before applying causal inference and quasi-experimental design, and his research also applies novel unstructured big data and machine learning to answer policy-relevant questions in socio-economic behaviour and political economy. He advocates reproducible science and contributes to open scientific software.

He obtained his BSc in Economics & Management from the University of London International Programmes (First Class Honours), and MSc and PhD (Economics) from Nanyang Technological University.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Does working from home work? A natural experiment from lockdowns.
  Eur Econ Rev. 2023. Jan(151):104323. doi: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2022.1042323.

Besides his role at A*STAR IHDP, S. Sendhil Velan also serves as an adjunct associate professor at the National University of Singapore. Additionally, he is the co-president of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (Chapter of Singapore).

He specialises in magnetic resonance imaging, magnetic resonance spectroscopy of metabolic diseases, multi-parametric and multi-modal imaging of body fat partitioning during obesity, weight loss imaging methods implementation, and development for characterising metabolism in paediatric, adults and the ageing population. During his time with SICS, Velan has developed MR imaging and spectroscopy R&D programmes for characterising metabolism for the GUSTO, SAMS and S-PRESTO studies, quantitative imaging of body fat (white, brown, and beige) in rodents and humans, and developed advanced MR-PET/ MRS techniques for characterising metabolism.

Velan obtained his Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, Master of Philosophy and PhD in Biophysics from the University of Madras, and did his post-doctoral fellowship in magnetic resonance methodologies at the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI of brown and beige adipose tissues.
  Magn Reson Med. 2020 Jul;84(1):384-395. doi: 10.1002/mrm.28118. Epub 2019 Dec 4.

• Determinants of intramyocellular lipid accumulation in early childhood.
  Int J Obes (Lond). 2020 May;44(5):1141-1151. doi: 10.1038/s41366-019-0435-8. Epub 2019 Aug 28.

• Association Between Early Life Weight Gain and Abdominal Fat Partitioning at 4.5 Years is Sex, Ethnicity, and Age Dependent.
  Obesity (Silver Spring). 2019 Mar;27(3):470-478. doi: 10.1002/oby.22408. Epub 2019 Feb 1.

Before joining A*STAR IHDP's Human Development domain, Jadegoud (Jadesh) Yaligar was with A*STAR's Singapore Bioimaging Consortium (SBIC) and Institute of Bioengineering and Bioimaging (IBB).

His research interest is focused on nutritional and lifestyle interventions for improving insulin sensitivity, ectopic fat metabolism, and mitochondrial metabolism in obese/pre-diabetic cohorts, evaluating the metabolic effects of dietary nitrate supplementation, characterisation of metabolically unhealthy obese (MUO) Asian phenotype, and association of pancreatic fat with beta-cell function and plasma metabolomics profiles at pre-pregnancy and postpartum in Singaporean women (using the S-PRESTO cohort).

He is also involved in metabolic and functional imaging of cancer in animal models. Projects he has worked on include metabolic imaging of the pancreas, liver, adiposity and muscle mitochondrial functions in obese and diabetic animal models, and clinical metabolic studies focused on understanding the whole-body fat metabolism in response to weight loss interventions. He has worked on nutritional and metabolic imaging of food function and structure evaluating the different diets (Asian/Western) for understanding the body fat partitioning and metabolism in animal models.  Additionally, he specialises in metabolomics of intact/biopsy tissue samples and body fluids by 1H, 13C, 31P high-resolution magic angle spinning (HRMAS) spectroscopy and high-resolution NMR. He coordinated the IBB food research programme focused on nutritional metabolism and body composition imaging.

Yaligar obtained his PhD from Gulbarga University in India. After his PhD, he moved to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in the U.S. to conduct postdoctoral research on metabolic imaging of hypoxia/lactate in prostate and breast cancer models.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Effect of an Asian-adapted Mediterranean diet and pentadecanoic acid on fatty liver disease: the TANGO randomized controlled trial.
  Am J Clin Nutr. 2024 Mar;119(3):788-799. doi: 10.1016/j.ajcnut.2023.11.013. Epub 2023 Nov 29.
  

• Exploring multi-omics and clinical characteristics linked to accelerated biological aging in Asian women of reproductive age: insights from the S-PRESTO study.
  Genome Med. 2024 Nov 8;16(1):128. doi: 10.1186/s13073-024-01403-7.
  

• Clinical and imaging features of women with polygenic partial lipodystrophy: A case series.
  Nutr Diabetes. 2024 Feb 6;14(1):3. doi: 10.1038/s41387-024-00260-y.
  
  

Jean Yeung is Director of Social Sciences under the Human Development domain at A*STAR IHDP and a Professor at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. She is also the inaugural President of the Population Association of Singapore, and the Founding Director of the Centre for Family and Population Research at NUS. She was previously a Provost-Chair Professor at the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Sociology Department. 

Yeung's research focuses on various aspects of family and population transitions in Asia including ageing, marriage, family values, and child development. She has led national studies on family and children’s well-being in the U.S., China, and Singapore, been on the editorial boards of several top-ranking international journals, and on numerous scientific review committees and advisory boards. She is the principal investigator for the Singapore Longitudinal Early Development Study (SG-LEADS), which examines human development in Singapore by using innovative methods to understand factors that can promote Singaporean children’s early childhood development, and provide input that can help address these factors.

Her current research includes various family demographic issues in Asia and America. Her work appears in leading journals and is cited widely in academic publications and high-impact media such as BBC News and The Economist. Her recent publications include changing family values and behaviour, children's well-being, human capital, and ageing.

Yeung obtained her MA in Sociology from the Illinois State University, and her PhD in Sociology from the University of Alberta.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• COVID-19 experiences and family resilience: A latent class analysis.
  Journal of Marriage and Family. 3 September 2024. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.13031.
  

• Achievement Gaps before School in Singapore: Family SES, Parental Values and Young Children's Self-Regulation.
  Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 4th Quarter 2023, Pages 352-362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2023.07.012.

• Paternity leave, family dynamics, and children's behavior in Singapore.
  Journal of Marriage and Family. 16 November 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12896.
  

Currently a scientist with A*STAR IHDP, Narasimhan Kothandaraman previously held similar positions with King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia, Cleveland Clinic in the U.S., and University of Western Cape in South Africa.

Specialising in biomarker discovery through integration of OMICS in genetic epidemiology for large cohort studies, machine learning, data and text mining, and network biology, Kothandaraman’s research interests at SICS include genetic association studies based on GUSTO cohorts using metabolomics and lipidomics approaches to associate offspring and maternal outcomes.

Significant projects he has worked on include using metabolites and lipids as biomarkers for pregnancy and birth outcomes in the GUSTO cohort across different ethnicities in Singapore; prediction of metabolic signatures for gestational diabetes and preterm birth-associated metabolic changes in placenta, body fluids using mass spectrometry (MS)-based targeted and untargeted techniques, as well as subsequent development of multivariate models to associate lipids with birth and pregnancy outcomes; and ongitudinal analysis of child growth and development using metabolomics and lipidomics data.

Kothandaraman received his PhD from the Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore for his work on metabolomics of phenylpropanoid mutants in 2003. Subsequently, he worked as a research fellow at the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Department at the National University Health System in the field of biomarker discovery for prenatal diagnosis and gynaecological malignancies using MS platforms. He joined the Systems Biology and Biomarker Discovery group at SICS in 2017.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Diagnostic accuracy of haptoglobin within ovarian cyst fluid as a potential point-of-care test for epithelial ovarian cancer: an observational study.
  BJOG. 2018 Mar;125(4):421-431. doi: 10.1111/1471-0528.14835. Epub 2017 Sep 4.

• Pathogenic landscape of idiopathic male infertility: new insight towards its regulatory networks.
  NPJ Genom Med. 2016 Aug 17;1:16023. doi: 10.1038/npjgenmed.2016.23. eCollection 2016.

• Proteomic analysis of human placental syncytiotrophoblast microvesicles in preeclampsia.
  Clin Proteomics. 2014 Nov 19;11(1):40. doi: 10.1186/1559-0275-11-40. eCollection 2014.

In addition to her role with A*STAR IHDP, Keri McCrickerd is also an Assistant Professor with the Department of Paediatrics, NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine's Centre for Behavioural and Implementation Science Interventions (BISI), and Deputy Director (Research & Development) at the Centre for Holistic Initiatives in Learning and Development (CHILD) at NUS. 

A research psychologist specialising in eating behaviour and a chartered psychologist with the British Psychological Society, McCrickerd’s work focuses on defining the cognitive and sensory factors influencing appetite regulation and understanding the early drivers of eating behaviour. Her research combines behavioural studies with insights gained from the GUSTO birth cohort and partnerships with local schools. Through her scientific work, she aims to understand why we eat the way we do and develop strategies to promote health and well-being through regulation of appetite and food intake.

Since joining A*STAR IHDP in 2015, she has achieved several awards, including the New Investigator Travel Award by the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behaviour in 2017, the first runner-up for the Drummond Early Career Nutrition Scientist Award by the British Nutrition Foundation in 2018, the Rising Star Award by the Asia Oceania Association for the Study of Obesity in 2019, and the A*STAR Career Development Award Grant for her project ‘Testing a bio-behavioural toolbox to promote eating self-regulation in preschool children’ in 2020.

McCrickerd obtained her BSc in Experimental Psychology from the University of Bristol and her PhD in Psychology from the University of Sussex.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Associations between inhibitory control, eating behaviours and adiposity in 6 year old children.
  Int J Obes, 2019.  43: 1344–1353.

• Cultivating self-regulatory eating behaviours during childhood: The evidence and opportunities.
  Nutrition Bulletin, 2018. 43(4): 388-399.

• Texture-Based Differences in Eating Rate Reduce the Impact of Increased Energy Density and Large Portions on Meal Size in Adults.
  J Nutr. 2017 Jun;147(6):1208-1217.doi: 10.3945/jn.116.244251.Epub 2017 Apr 26.
  

• Determinants of intramyocellular lipid accumulation in early childhood.
  Int J Obes (Lond). 2020 May;44(5):1141-1151. doi: 10.1038/s41366-019-0435-8. Epub 2019 Aug 28.

• Low-Dose Levothyroxine Reduces Intrahepatic Lipid Content in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and NAFLD.
  J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2018 Jul 1;103(7):2698-2706. doi: 10.1210/jc.2018-00475.

• Ectopic fat and aerobic fitness are key determinants of glucose homeostasis in nonobese Asians.
  Eur J Clin Invest. 2019 May;49(5):e13079. doi: 10.1111/eci.13079. Epub 2019 Feb 25.

Having been with A*STAR IHDP since 2010, Suresh Anand Sadananthan is a scientist with the institute’s Metabolic Imaging group under the Human Development programme.

Through his research, he aims to better understand body fat partitioning and its relationship with metabolic health in adults and children. He is involved in the development and application of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopy-based biomarkers for non-invasive investigation of fat distribution in the abdomen and other ectopic sites, and development of image analysis techniques based on deep learning for the segmentation of MR images.

Actively involved in GUSTO and S-PRESTO studies that focus on the investigation of maternal and early life determinants of childhood obesity and metabolic disorders, Sadananthan hopes to expand the investigation of body fat partitioning in the developmental cohorts at A*STAR IHDP to include assessment of cardiac fat, structure, and function by MRI and look at the early life risk factors for future cardiovascular and metabolic health. He’s also interested in understanding the pathogenesis of gestational diabetes mellitus and its progression to type 2 diabetes mellitus post-delivery,

He obtained his Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Madras, his Masters of technology from the University of Mysore, and his PhD in Computer Engineering from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Maternal glycemia during pregnancy and offspring abdominal adiposity measured by MRI in the neonatal period and preschool years: The Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes (GUSTO) prospective mother-offspring birth cohort study.
  Am J Clin Nutr. 2020 Jul 1;112(1):39-47. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/nqaa055.

• Association Between Early Life Weight Gain and Abdominal Fat Partitioning at 4.5 Years is Sex, Ethnicity, and Age Dependent.
  Obesity (Silver Spring). 2019 Mar;27(3):470-478. doi: 10.1002/oby.22408. Epub 2019 Feb 1.

• Automated segmentation of visceral and subcutaneous (deep and superficial) adipose tissues in normal and overweight men.
  J Magn Reson Imaging. 2015 Apr;41(4):924-34. doi: 10.1002/jmri.24655. Epub 2014 May 7.

Besides her role at A*STAR IHDP, Mya Thway Tint is also a senior research fellow in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

Her area of expertise is in body composition using advanced criterion methods such as air displacement plethysmography, magnetic resonance imaging, and quantitative magnetic resonance imaging. Her research focuses on developmental influences of offspring’s metabolic risk and bone health in reproductive-age women and children. She is involved in the GUSTO, S-PRESTO and NiPPeR studies.

Tint obtained her MBBS from the Institute of Medicine (1) in Myanmar, and her Master of Science and PhD from the National University of Singapore.

PUBLICATIONS

• Association Between Early Life Weight Gain and Abdominal Fat Partitioning at 4.5 Years is Sex, Ethnicity, and Age Dependent.
  Obesity (Silver Spring). 2019 Mar;27(3):470-478. doi: 10.1002/oby.22408. Epub 2019 Feb 1.

• Association between maternal mid-gestation vitamin D status and neonatal abdominal adiposity.
  Int J Obes (Lond). 2018 Jul;42(7):1296-1305. doi: 10.1038/s41366-018-0032-2. Epub 2018 Mar 9.

• Adherence to a healthy eating index for pregnant women is associated with lower neonatal adiposity in a multiethnic Asian cohort: the Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes (GUSTO) Study.
  Am J Clin Nutr. 2018 Jan 1;107(1):71-79. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/nqx003.
  

Pan Hong's research involves identifying molecular signatures related to health and development for women and children. In addition to studying high-throughput genome wide measures such as genetics, epigenetics, transcriptomics, lipidomics and metabolomics for Singaporean cohort studies, she also investigates the correlations and interactions among multiple omics for in-depth understanding and novel discovery through association studies and quantitative trait loci (QTL) analyses.

Possessing a background in computer science, Pan has a keen interest in cellular gene regulation from both computational methods and single cell technologies, and optimised computing and machine learning algorithms. She developed a R software package for efficiently computing the relations between gene, environment and methylation (GEM tool suites). Her other notable achievements include developing an integrative multi-omics database (iMOMdb) for Asian pregnant women and lipid quantitative trait loci (LipidQTL) of the longitudinal lipidomics for Asian mothers and children.

Prior to joining A*STAR IHDP, Pan was with A*STAR Genome Institute of Singapore and A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research where she received honours, awards, patents and publications for informatics and computational biology. She also boasts industry experience in Eli Lilly ‘s now defunct Singapore Centre for Drug Discovery where she was involved in award-winning projects for disease ontology and precision medicine.

Pan obtained her Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Signal processing from Anhui University in China, and her Master of Computer Vision and PhD in Computer Science from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS  

• Long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, gestation duration, and birth size: a Mendelian randomization study using fatty acid desaturase variants.
  Am J Clin Nutr. 2018 Jul 1;108(1):92-100. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/nqy079.

• Gene, Environment and Methylation (GEM): a tool suite to efficiently navigate large scale epigenome wide association studies and integrate genotype and interaction between genotype and environment.
  BMC Bioinformatics. 2016 Aug 2;17:299. doi: 10.1186/s12859-016-1161-z.

• Comparison of Methyl-capture Sequencing vs. Infinium 450K methylation array for methylome analysis in clinical samples.
  Epigenetics. 2016;11(1):36-48. doi: 10.1080/15592294.2015.1132136. Epub 2016 Jan 19.
  

Dennis Wang helms A*STAR IHDP’s Bioinformatics platform, which integrates expertise in computer science with biology and mathematics to support analytics with large and/or multi-dimensional data. Additionally, he holds the Academy of Medical Sciences Professorship (Chair in Data Science) at Imperial College London.

Wang’s research focuses on translating patterns in the human genome into actionable information that accelerates the development of treatments for complex diseases. Specialising in big data analysis, drug development (small molecules and biologics), algorithmic development, software design, web service development, genomic profiling, and statistical inference, his experience includes applying machine learning and statistical approaches to identify patterns from large genomic data sets and providing clinically actionable biomarkers to drug development teams.

Having worked in both academia and industry, Wang enjoys mentoring junior bioinformaticians and clinicians wanting to apply genomics to patient care and marrying research and teaching to promote data driven approaches for personalising medicines. Among his most significant projects are a crowd-sourcing machine learning challenge to predict drug combinations involving partners from pharma and technology industries; improving whole genome sequencing methods for the diagnosis of complex diseases, such as dementia, motor neurone disease and COVID-19; and developing computational methods for integrating omics data from patients to advance precision medicine for treating lung cancer and pulmonary hypertension.

He has received numerous awards, including the EPSRC Healthcare Technologies grant in 2021, the Rosetrees Seedcorn Award and Academy of Medical Sciences Springboard Award in 2019, the MRC Proximity to Discovery Award in 2017, and the AstraZeneca Innovative Medicines Award in 2016.

Wang obtained his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Microbiology and Immunology from The University of British Columbia, and both his Master of Philosophy in Computational Biology and PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Cambridge.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Genomic loci susceptible to systematic sequencing bias in clinical whole genomes.
  Genome Res. 2020 Mar;30(3):415-426. doi: 10.1101/gr.255349.119. Epub 2020 Mar 10.

• A statistical framework for assessing pharmacological response and biomarkers using uncertainty estimates.
  Elife. 2020 Dec 4;9:e60352. doi: 10.7554/eLife.60352.

• Community assessment to advance computational prediction of cancer drug combinations in a pharmacogenomic screen.
  Nat Commun. 2019 Jun 17;10(1):2674. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-09799-2.

Candida Vaz has been with A*STAR IHDP since 2018. Prior to joining the institute, Vaz was with A*STAR’s Bioinformatics Institute for almost seven years where she was involved in projects primarily related to next generation sequencing data analysis.

She has brought her wealth of experience in data analysis to her research at A*STAR IHDP where she specialises in RNA-Seq and Small RNA Sequencing data analysis. Her work comprises expression profiling and functional analysis of genes and small non-coding RNAs (miRNA, tRFs and piRNAs) significantly changing due to a treatment/condition.

Her most significant research projects/studies to date include the ‘Role of Sperm SncRNAs (miRNA, tRFs and piRNAs) in mediating Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance’, the ‘Role of SncRNAs in Gestational Diabetes’, and the ‘Study of Maternal Anxiety and Mood Disorder Transcriptomics’.

She holds a MSc in biotechnology from Mohanlal Sukhadia University – Udaipur, and a PhD in bioinformatics and biotechnology from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Find out more about her here.

PUBLICATIONS

• Progressive expression of PPARGC1α is associated with hair miniaturization in androgenetic alopecia.
  Sci Rep. 2019 Jun 19;9(1):8771.

• Embryonic Stem Cells exhibit mRNA isoform specific translational regulation.
  PLoS One.2016 Jan 22;11(1):e0143235.

• Deep sequencing of small RNA facilitates tissue and sex associated microRNA discovery in zebrafish.
  BMC Genomics. 2015; 16: 950. Published online 2015 Nov 16. doi: 10.1186/s12864-015-2135-7.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Attention deficit hyperactivity and oppositional defiant disorder symptoms in adolescence and risk of substance use disorders-A general population-based birth cohort study.
  Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2023 Sep;148(3):277-287.doi: 10.1111/acps.13588.Epub 2023 Jul 11.

• Getting them through the door: Social and behavioral determinants of uptake and engagement in an obesity intervention.
  Obes Res Clin Pract. 2023 Jan-Feb;17(1):86-90.doi: 10.1016/j.orcp.2022.11.002.Epub 2022 Nov 12.

• A genome-wide association study of total child psychiatric problems scores.
  PLoS One. 2022 Aug 22;17(8):e0273116.doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273116.eCollection 2022.

Zhang Han's scientific work focuses on the human brain and behaviour development, particularly in the influences of brain and behaviour development in children and adolescents, and the psychobiological resilience of individuals.

Her professional expertise includes statistical data analysis, data analytics, programming, cognitive neuroscience, and MRI, while her research interests lie in the individual difference of brain networks in a developmental perspective; transgenerational transmission of maternal adversity; and neurocognitive development study with large-scale big data.

Zhang obtained her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Qufu Normal University, and her PhD in Developmental and Educational Psychology from the Beijing Normal University.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Maternal Adverse Childhood Experience and Depression in Relation with Brain Network Development and Behaviors in Children: A Longitudinal Study.
  Cerebral Cortex, 2021.Cereb Cortex. 2021 Apr 7;bhab081. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhab081. Online ahead of print.

• Do intrinsic brain functional networks predict working memory from childhood to adulthood?
  Hum Brain Mapp. 2020 Nov;41(16):4574-4586. doi: 10.1002/hbm.25143. Epub 2020 Jul 30.

• Parental and social factors in relation to child psychopathology, behavior, and cognitive function.
  Transl Psychiatry. 2020 Feb 26;10(1):80. doi: 10.1038/s41398-020-0761-6.

In addition to her role at A*STAR IHDP, Karen Tan is also a consultant at the National University Hospital’s Department of Laboratory Medicine with a sub-specialty in molecular diagnosis.

Her research interests lie in blood biomarkers in clinical research on human potential and molecular diagnostics. Some of the key projects she has been involved in include ‘Tryptophan metabolites association with adiposity in infants and children’, ‘Clinical lipids in children and association with cardiovascular risk factors’, and ‘Cord blood adipokines and neonatal adiposity’.

Tan obtained her Bachelor of Science and MBBS from the National University of Singapore, and her PhD from the University of Cambridge.


PUBLICATIONS

• Mismatch between poor fetal growth and rapid postnatal weight gain in the first 2 years of life is associated with higher blood pressure and insulin resistance without increased adiposity in childhood: the GUSTO cohort study.
  Int J Epidemiol. 2020 Oct 1;49(5):1591-1603. doi: 10.1093/ije/dyaa143.

• Genetic Link Determining the Maternal-Fetal Circulation of Vitamin D (October 2, 2019).
  Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3463277 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3463277.

With a keen interest in behavioural and psychosocial factors pertaining to (un)healthy growth in childhood, Anna Fogel's research is largely focused on individual differences in behavioural susceptibility to obesity in the first years of life – particularly the role of intrinsic and environmental influences on children’s appetite and their expression in the four aspects of eating behaviour (What, How, How much and When children eat). Involved in GUSTO, she’s been investigating modifiable eating behaviours that promote increased energy intakes and obesity in children, with particular focus on oral processing characteristics, portion size preferences, snacking patterns and general dietary habits.

Skilled in project design and management, data analysis and various types of data presentation, her work revolves around childhood feeding and eating behaviours, and family-level behaviour change programmes that improve physical and mental health.

In 2017, she received the Conference travel award from Asia Oceania Association for the Study of Obesity and the Harry R. Kissileff Award from the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behaviour.

Fogel obtained her Bachelor of Science in Systems Biology from the University of Sunderland, her Master of Science from Bielefeld University, and her PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Birmingham.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Associations between inhibitory control, eating behaviours and adiposity in 6-year-old children.
  Int J Obes (Lond). 2019 Jul;43(7):1344-1353. doi: 10.1038/s41366-019-0343-y. Epub 2019 Mar 28.

• Prospective associations between parental feeding practices and children's oral processing behaviours.
  Matern Child Nutr. 2019 Jan;15(1):e12635. doi: 10.1111/mcn.12635. Epub 2018 Jul 27.

• A description of an 'obesogenic' eating style that promotes higher energy intake and is associated with greater adiposity in 4.5year-old children: Results from the GUSTO cohort.
  Physiol Behav. 2017 Jul 1;176:107-116. doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2017.02.013. Epub 2017 Feb 14.

A scientist under the Human Development programme at A*STAR IHDP, Lai Jun Shi’s research interests focus on the role of nutrition in pregnancy outcomes and offspring health. In addition, she’s also keen to understand the impact of women’s changing life-stages and circumstances (e.g. preconception, pregnancy, motherhood) on their lifestyle habits (e.g. diet, physical activity) and health outcomes.

In 2018, she received the Robert Suskind and Leslie Lewinter-Suskind Travel Award.

Lai obtained her Bachelor of Nutrition & Dietetics, her Masters of Clinical Epidemiology and her PhD in Community Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology from The University of Newcastle, Australia.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Maternal plasma vitamin B12 concentrations during pregnancy and infant cognitive outcomes at 2 years of age.
  Br J Nutr. 2019 Jun;121(11):1303-1312. doi: 10.1017/S0007114519000746. Epub 2019 Apr 2.

• Macronutrient composition and food groups associated with gestational weight gain: the GUSTO study.
  Eur J Nutr. 2019 Apr;58(3):1081-1094. doi: 10.1007/s00394-018-1623-3. Epub 2018 Feb 13.

• High folate and low vitamin B12 status during pregnancy is associated with gestational diabetes mellitus.
  Clin Nutr. 2018 Jun;37(3):940-947. doi: 10.1016/j.clnu.2017.03.022. Epub 2017 Mar 24.

Priti Mishra's research interests lie in developing new statistical models, and the application of various statistical methods and bioinformatics tools to derive biologically relevant information from multi-omics data.

She leads projects that longitudinally profile the associations of various maternal as well as offspring parameters, related to antenatal, in utero and postnatal stages, using multi-omics platforms.

Mishra obtained her Bachelor of Technology from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur, India; her Master of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India; and her PhD in Metabolomics from the National University of Singapore.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Assessing pH-dependent toxicity of fluoxetine in embryonic zebrafish using mass spectrometry-based metabolomics.
  Sci Total Environ. 2019 Feb 10;650(Pt 2):2731-2741. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.09.364. Epub 2018 Oct 1.

• Assessing biological effects of fluoxetine in developing zebrafish embryos using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry based metabolomics.
  Chemosphere. 2017 Dec;188:157-167. doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2017.08.149. Epub 2017 Aug 31.

Alexander Mok is a research fellow with the Human Development programme at A*STAR IHDP. His research and professional interests span the fields of integrative human physiology, epidemiology, public health policy, and health economics.

Appreciating that population health is influenced by a range of social-ecological factors which lie beyond the remit of the healthcare sector, he endeavours to contribute in research and policymaking to tackle the social determinants of health inequalities.

Prior to joining SICS, Mok was a consultant with the World Health Organization (WHO), working on the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases and their impact on COVID-19 outcomes.

He completed his PhD in Population Health Sciences from the University of Cambridge, investigating the impact of lifestyle risk factors on chronic diseases and life expectancy. Keen to understand the nexus between science and policy, and the translation of research into practice, he subsequently obtained a Master of Public Policy (MPP) from the University of Oxford. 

Previously, Mok graduated with a Master’s degree in Epidemiology and completed interdisciplinary studies in public health at Harvard University.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Physical activity trajectories and mortality: population based cohort study.
  BMJ. 2019 Jun 26;365:l2323.doi: 10.1136/bmj.l2323. 

• Postprandial changes in cardiometabolic disease risk in young Chinese men following isocaloric high or low protein diets, stratified by either high or low meal frequency - a randomized controlled crossover trial.
  Nutr J. 2016 Mar 15;15:27.doi: 10.1186/s12937-016-0141-5.

• Effect of sprint interval versus continuous exercise on postprandial lipaemia.
  J Sports Sci. 2013;31(9):989-95.

Alyssa Ng’s research interests lie in understanding lifestyle and environmental influences affecting mental health and cognitive outcomes. Presently, her work at A*STAR IHDP focuses on studying the effects of maternal health during pregnancy and early-life exposures on child neurodevelopment, and underlying brain-body connections.

During her PhD studies, she designed and led projects which involved collecting real-time data from participants across days using a combination of health tracking wearables and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) smartphone applications to capture insights into how sleep patterns impacted mental well-being and continuous blood sugar in healthy adults, while controlling dietary factors.

Ng obtained her BA (Hons) in Psychology at the University of Melbourne, and earned her PhD at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

Find out more about her  here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Effects of night-to-night variations in objectively measured sleep on blood glucose in healthy university students.
  Sleep. 2025 Feb 10;48(2):zsae224. doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsae224.
  

• Sleep, Well-Being, and Cognition in Medical Interns on a Float or Overnight Call Schedule.
  Observational Study. JAMA Netw Open. 2024 Oct 1;7(10):e2438350. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.38350.

• Assessing 'readiness' by tracking fluctuations in daily sleep duration and their effects on daily mood, motivation, and sleepiness.
  Sleep Med. 2023 Dec:112:30-38. doi: 10.1016/j.sleep.2023.09.028. Epub 2023 Sep 28.

Bryan Ng’s research focuses on human ageing and age-related neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases which lead to dementia.

Ng previously held a visiting research fellow position at the UK Dementia Research Institute at University College London studying cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers of ageing in Alzheimer’s disease patients. He found that the levels of soluble factors associated with cellular senescence, one of the major hallmarks of ageing, can differentiate Alzheimer’s disease patients from age-matched individuals. Prior to his post-doctoral work, he worked on human stem cell models of Huntington’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. During his PhD studies, he showed that stem cell models in a dish can reflect clinical outcomes of Alzheimer’s disease patients from whom the stem cells were derived in a deeply phenotyped cohort. 

Trained in studying human stem cell models and fluid biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases, Ng is particularly interested in working at the interface between clinical and preclinical studies related to the interaction between ageing, the biggest non-genetic risk factor of multiple chronic diseases including neurodegenerative diseases, and dementia. His research will focus on early ageing and its association with dementia risks specifically in the adult participants of the GUSTO and S-PRESTO cohorts at A*STAR IHDP. Through his research, Ng aims to improve overall health-span of individuals who may be at risk of suffering from age-related neurodegenerative diseases. 

Ng obtained his Bachelor of Science (Hons) in life sciences specialising in molecular and cell biology with a minor in biophysics from National University of Singapore, before obtaining his PhD from the University of Oxford on stem cell models of Alzheimer’s disease. During his PhD studies, Ng received Alzheimer’s Research UK’s Early Career Award. 


PUBLICATIONS

• Neurons derived from individual early Alzheimer's disease patients reflect their clinical vulnerability.
  Brain Commun. 2022 Oct 21;4(6):fcac267.doi: 10.1093/braincomms/fcac267.eCollection 2022.

• pS421 huntingtin modulates mitochondrial phenotypes and confers neuroprotection in an HD hiPSC model.
  Cell Death Dis. 2020 Sep 25;11(9):809.doi: 10.1038/s41419-020-02983-z.

• Reversal of Phenotypic Abnormalities by CRISPR/Cas9-Mediated Gene Correction in Huntington Disease Patient-Derived Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells.
  Stem Cell Reports. 2017 Mar 14;8(3):619-633.

PUBLICATIONS

• Development of "LvL UP 1.0": a smartphone-based, conversational agent-delivered holistic lifestyle intervention for the prevention of non-communicable diseases and common mental disorders.
  Front Digit Health. 2023 May 10;5:1039171.doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2023.1039171. eCollection 2023.

• Exploring the Perceptions of mHealth Interventions for the Prevention of Common Mental Disorders in University Students in Singapore: Qualitative Study.
  J Med Internet Res. 2023 Mar 20;25:e44542. doi: 10.2196/44542.

• Assessing the Efficacy and Acceptability of a Web-Based Intervention for Resilience Among College Students: Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial.
  JMIR Form Res. 2020 Nov 11;4(11):e20167. doi: 10.2196/20167.

Alessandro Sparacio's research at SICS encompasses studies on cognition, mood, and stress, where he is actively engaged in advancing the field of nutrition and health. In this capacity, Sparacio orchestrates the design of clinical studies and meticulously crafts protocols to ensure scientific integrity while maintaining operational feasibility.

Sparacio completed his PhD studies with a specialisation in stress regulation and well-being. A pivotal part of his doctorate programme involved leading a multi-site mindfulness project. This ambitious endeavour involved collaboration with 60 researchers across 37 sites, resulting in the collection of data from 3,627 participants. The study's findings provided evidence that brief stand-alone mindfulness exercises are more effective than an active control condition in reducing stress levels among participants. While pursuing his PhD, he also undertook two significant meta-analyses that evaluated the efficacy of various regulation strategies in reducing stress. The first pre-registered meta-analysis assessed the impact of internal regulation strategies like mindfulness and biofeedback on stress reduction. The second meta-analytic synthesis took the form of a registered report and explored the effectiveness of external regulation strategies, including being in nature and emotional social support. Both meta-analyses highlighted the need for improvement in the literature on stress regulation due to issues such as underpowered studies and high risk of bias.

He obtained his bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's degree in social psychology from the University of Milano-Bicocca, and earned his joint PhD from Université Grenoble Alpes and Swansea University.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Self-administered mindfulness interventions reduce stress in a large, randomized controlled multi-site study. 
  Nat Hum Behav. 2024 Jun 11. doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-01907-7. 
  

• Stress regulation via being in nature and social support in adults: A Meta-analysis.
  Collabra: Psychology 9(1), 77343 (2023).

• Towards theory formalization in (social) embodiment: A tutorial.
  In Handbook of Embodied Psychology, 339-356 (2021). 

Besides her role at A*STAR IHDP, Noor Hidayatul Aini Bte Suaini is also a research associate with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.

She started her research journey in paediatric food allergy during her Honours year at the University of Melbourne where she looked into the epidemiology and genetics of vitamin D deficiency which is known to be one of the risk factors for food allergy in Australian children living in Melbourne. Since then, her research has primarily focused on investigating the environmental and genetic risk factors for food allergy in Australian children compared to Asian children who are residing in Australia. While she predominantly works on food allergy, she has also explored other atopic diseases such as asthma, allergic rhinitis and atopic dermatitis.

A significant project she has worked on is the HealthNuts study, a population-based longitudinal study of food allergy comprising 5,300 infants in Melbourne, Australia. The infants were recruited when they were a year old and were followed up at age two, four, six and 10. Given the comprehensive nature of the study and data collected, the HealthNuts study has formed the basis of all her past research work.

Suaini received the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Meeting Travel Award, the Murdoch Children's Research Institute Travel Scholarship and the Centre for Food and Allergy Research Travel Award in 2018, and in 2017 she received the Pediatric Allergy and Asthma Meeting Travel Award, the Abstract award for outstanding research and abstract presentation at the Pediatric Allergy and Asthma Meeting , the Henry and Rachel Ackman (University of Melbourne) Travelling Scholarship, and  the Global Young Scientists Summit Travel Award.

She obtained both her Bachelor of Science and PhD from the University of Melbourne.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Genetic determinants of paediatric food allergy: A systematic review.
  Allergy. 2019 Sep;74(9):1631-1648. doi: 10.1111/all.13767. Epub 2019 Apr 2.

• Children with East Asian-Born Parents Have an Increased Risk of Allergy but May Not Have More Asthma in Early Childhood.
  J Allergy Clin Immunol Pract. 2019 Feb;7(2):539-547.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.jaip.2018.07.042. Epub 2018 Aug 24.

• Polymorphisms affecting vitamin D-binding protein modify the relationship between serum vitamin D (25[OH]D3) and food allergy.
  J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2016 Feb;137(2):500-506.e4. doi: 10.1016/j.jaci.2015.05.051. Epub 2015 Aug 7.

Sun Lijuan’s research focuses on the role of nutrition and food composition in regulating glycaemic and insulinemic response to prevent obesity and diabetes.

In collaboration with industry partners and academic institutes, Sun has worked on projects such as the activation of brown adipose tissue to regulate energy expenditure and thyroid hormones in healthy humans and hyperthyroid patients; how the food sequence or macronutrient composition affects postprandial glycaemic and insulinemic responses; and how chronic nutraceuticals and cold exposure induce the white adipose tissue browning process.

Sun obtained her PhD from the Institute for Nutritional Science in China and subsequently did her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Kentucky. She also spent six months as a visiting scholar at the Nestlé Research Center in Switzerland and seven months at the Yale School of Medicine.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Brown Adipose Tissue: Multimodality Evaluation by PET, MRI, Infrared Thermography, and Whole-Body Calorimetry (TACTICAL-II).
  Obesity (Silver Spring). 2019 Sep;27(9):1434-1442. doi: 10.1002/oby.22560. Epub 2019 Jul 13.

• Postprandial glucose, insulin and incretin responses differ by test meal macronutrient ingestion sequence (PATTERN study).
  Clin Nutr. 2020 Mar;39(3):950-957. doi: 10.1016/j.clnu.2019.04.001. Epub 2019 Apr 27.

• Capsinoids activate brown adipose tissue (BAT) with increased energy expenditure associated with subthreshold 18-fluorine fluorodeoxyglucose uptake in BAT-positive humans confirmed by positron emission tomography scan.
  Am J Clin Nutr. 2018 Jan 1;107(1):62-70. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/nqx025.

Besides her role at A*STAR IHDP, Elaine Tham is also an associate fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the U.K., a member of the British Psychological Society, and a student non-technologist of the European Society of Sleep Technologists.

She has a broad interest in longitudinal child sleep development, particularly using more objective techniques like sleep polysomnography or sleep actigraphy; child neurodevelopment, especially in the domains of cognitive neuroscience, memory and learning; and maternal sleep, including how maternal sleep associates with maternal mood, which may in turn relate with child development.

Tham has worked on projects involving sleep actigraphy where an actigraph watch was used to access objective sleep activity data in GUSTO infants from age six months to 54 months. Industry projects she has worked in involved deriving longitudinal sleep trajectories across childhood and relating them to individual differences in neurodevelopment. She’s also involved in collaborations with the Neurodevelopment Research Centre where the team explores interplay between genetic and environmental factors on sleep and subsequent child development.

She obtained both her Bachelor of Science and PhD in Psychology from the University of York.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Variations in habitual sleep and relational memory in 6-month-olds.
  Sleep Health. 2019 Jun;5(3):257-265. doi: 10.1016/j.sleh.2018.12.007. Epub 2019 Jan 22.

• Infant sleep and its relation with cognition and growth: a narrative review.
  Nat Sci Sleep. 2017 May 15;9:135-149. doi: 10.2147/NSS.S125992. eCollection 2017.

• Infant night sleep trajectory from age 3–24 months: evidence from the Singapore GUSTO study.
  Sleep Med. 2017 May;33:82-84. doi: 10.1016/j.sleep.2017.01.013. Epub 2017 Feb 12.

Xu Jia is a bioinformatician in multi-omics gut microbiome under the institute’s Human Development programme.

Her research interests mainly focus on the symbiosis between gut microbiome and human host. Hence, she has worked on multi-omics data to identify microbiota with key roles in the child development and metabolic diseases, and also researched the mechanism in this relationship. This provides insights into early prevention of certain diseases and microbiome-based precision interventions.

Projects she has worked on include effects of ethnicity and early life exposures on the establishment of gut microbiota; rthe effect of host genetic variation on the child gut microbiome; and integrative study of metabolomics and microbiome during child development.

In 2019, her abstract titled ‘Ethnic Diversity Among The Key Factors Influencing The Development Of Human Gut Microbiota’ was selected among almost 800 abstracts as a winner of a travel award for the 11th DOHaD World Congress. 

Xu obtained her PhD from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Ethnic diversity in infant gut microbiota is apparent before the introduction of complementary diets.
  Gut Microbes. 2020 Sep 2;11(5):1362-1373. doi: 10.1080/19490976.2020.1756150. Epub 2020 May 26.

• Implication of gut microbiota in the association between infant antibiotic exposure and childhood obesity and adiposity accumulation.
  Int J Obes (Lond). 2020 Jul;44(7):1508-1520. doi: 10.1038/s41366-020-0572-0. Epub 2020 Apr 22.

• Structural Alteration of Gut Microbiota during the Amelioration of Human Type 2 Diabetes with Hyperlipidemia by Metformin and a Traditional Chinese Herbal Formula.
  mBio. 2018 May 22;9(3):e02392-17. doi: 10.1128/mBio.02392-17.

Hannah Yong's research interests lie in understanding the placental mechanisms underlying pregnancy disorders with the ultimate goal of developing novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets to improve maternal and foetal health during pregnancy, which will benefit women and their offspring in the long term.

Significant projects she has worked on include investigating the impact of placental endocrine function on fetal growth and postnatal metabolic outcomes; characterisation of maternal susceptibility genes in pre-eclampsia; and exploring the roles of vitamin D, its receptor and binding protein in intrauterine growth restriction. Under an A*STAR International Fellowship between 2017 and 2018, she investigated the importance of placental endocrine function in driving maternal pregnancy adaptations, regulating foetal growth and programming of long-term offspring health in a mouse model at the Centre for Trophoblast Research, University of Cambridge.

She has received many awards, including the DOHaD Society Travel Award in 2019; the Avrith Travel Grant from the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge in 2018; the Early Career Research Collaborative Travel Grant from the Bioscientifica Trust in 2018, and the Harold Fox New Investigator Award from the International Federation of Placental Associations in 2017.

Yong obtained both her Bachelor of Biomedicine (Honours) and PhD from The University of Melbourne.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• The Role of Placental Hormones in Mediating Maternal Adaptations to Support Pregnancy and Lactation.
  Front Physiol. 2018 Aug 17;9:1091. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2018.01091. eCollection 2018.

• Low-Dose Acetylsalicylic Acid Treatment Modulates the Production of Cytokines and Improves Trophoblast Function in an in Vitro Model of Early- Onset Preeclampsia.
  Am J Pathol. 2016 Dec;186(12):3217-3224. doi: 10.1016/j.ajpath.2016.08.010. Epub 2016 Oct 15.

• Anti-angiogenic Collagen Fragment Arresten is Increased from 16 Weeks' Gestation in Pre-eclamptic Plasma.
  Placenta. 2015 Nov;36(11):1300-9. doi: 10.1016/j.placenta.2015.08.013. Epub 2015 Aug 29.