.png?sfvrsn=3d5fcb32_2)
TRANSLATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE
Cai Shirong, Principal Scientist I
Cai Shirong’s main research interest is in infant sleep as a modifiable target for health interventions and the risk factors that shape infant sleep.
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 8th 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.
PUBLICATIONS
Evelyn Law, Principal Investigator
Evelyn Law is a clinician-scientist specialising in the area of developmental and behavioural paediatrics. In addition to her role as a principal investigator at A*STAR IHDP, she’s also an assistant professor in the Department of Paediatrics at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and a consultant in the Department of Paediatrics at Khoo Teck Puat-National University Children's Medical Institute, National University Hospital (NUH).
Law’s research interests centre on the life course of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from preschool to adult years and the influences of family and child factors, including socioeconomic status (SES), parental psychopathology, and health on developmental outcomes of children. Her current studies and grants examine a prediction model of ADHD diagnostic stability in preschoolers and trajectories of executive functioning among children from different SES and family backgrounds in the GUSTO birth cohort study.
She received her Bachelor degree in Biological Sciences with cum laude and departmental honours from Northwestern University in 2002, and then pursued research in germ cell development at the Division of Reproductive, Stem Cell and Perinatal Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine before continuing her medical training. She completed residency in Paediatrics at the Harvard Medical School/Boston University School of Medicine joint programme in 2010, and completed subspecialty medical training in Developmental-Behavioural Paediatrics at Harvard Medical School/Boston Children’s Hospital. During her subspecialty training, she also completed the Clinical Effectiveness (Biostatistics and Epidemiology) Programme at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Find out more about her here.
PUBLICATIONS
Tan Ai Peng, Principal Scientist I
Her subspecialty is in the field of pediatric neuroradiology, with special interests in foetal and neonatal neuroimaging, radiogenomics, oncologic imaging and craniofacial malformations. Besides being actively involved in leading international conferences and multiple collaborative research studies, Tan has numerous publications and invited review papers in peer-reviewed international journals. She has also been invited on numerous occasions to give talks at local and international conferences in her areas of expertise.
Tan obtained her medical degree in 2006 from the National University of Malaysia, and completed her postgraduate neuroradiology training at the National University Hospital, Singapore. She obtained her Master of Medicine (Diagnostic Radiology) in 2012 and was awarded the Fellowship of the Royal College of Radiologists (FRCR) in the same year. She was awarded the Academic Medicine Development Award (AMDA) in 2016 and completed her fellowship in paediatric neuroradiology at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, NHS Foundation Trust in 2017. In 2019, she was awarded the European Diploma in Neuroradiology (EdiNR) by the European Society of Neuroradiology (ESNR).
Find out more about her here.
PUBLICATIONS
Lena Lim, Principal Scientist I
Lena Lim’s scientific work focuses on early-life stress – particularly the neural correlates of childhood maltreatment. She is interested in the neurobiological pathways between childhood trauma and the transition to psychiatric disorders and destructive behaviours, and how this may be moderated by genetic vulnerability. Her other research interests include self-harm and suicide in young people as well as childhood neurodevelopmental disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
She obtained her PhD (Child and Adolescent Psychiatry) and postdoctoral training from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London, U.K. She is also an Associate Fellow and Chartered Psychologist of the British Psychological Society (BPS), U.K.
PUBLICATIONS
Chan Shi Yu, Senior Scientist I
Chan Shi Yu’s research interests lie in studying the pathways that lead to diverse mental health outcomes.
In particular, she employs neuroimaging techniques (resting state functional connectivity and morphometric measures) to study how brain organisation and connectivity affects clinical and functional outcomes in psychiatry.
Chan previously held a joint post-doctoral position with the Psychosis Neurobiology Lab at McLean Hospital and the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School studying functional connectivity in early stage psychosis patients. She found that dynamic changes in resting state network connectivity was significantly correlated with outcome improvement or deterioration in patients. A second study she did examined the trajectory of thalamic connectivity changes that occur over the first five years of psychosis, and found diverse trajectories (stable, linear, curvilinear) depending on brain network, highlighting the limitations of studying early stage psychosis patients as a single cohort. Through her research, she aims to parse out sources of heterogeneity that could serve as intervention targets for the improvement of mental health outcomes.
She obtained her Bachelor of Science from the National University of Singapore and her PhD in Psychiatry from the University of Oxford.
PUBLICATIONS
Joanne Chia, Scientist
Joanne Chia is interested in studying how genes and the environment affect the brain and behaviour.
When she was pursuing her PhD, she made genetic modifications to the gene encoding the neuropeptide relaxin-3a in zebrafish, to examine how it could affect responses to stress and anxiety-like behaviour. When she did her postdoctoral fellowship with the Lee Kong Chuan School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, she investigated how bacteria released from fish skin could elicit fear behaviours (the alarm response) in zebrafish.
Through her research, she aims to better understand the molecular mechanisms and neural circuitry of emotional states such as stress, fear and anxiety, and how they produce behaviours in the human context.
Chia obtained both her Bachelor of Science and PhD from the National University of Singapore.
PUBLICATIONS
Huang Pei, Senior Scientist I
In addition to his role at A*STAR IHDP, Huang Pei is also a visiting fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Multimodal Neuroimaging in Neuropsychiatric Disorders Laboratory. He spent a year at A*STAR’s Singapore Bioimaging Consortium before joining SICS.
His research interests include improving the quality of and utilising novel analysis methods on MRI data, which in turn may provide a better understanding and early detection of neuropsychiatric disorders and allow medical professionals to better quantify effectiveness of the treatments. While pursuing his PhD, he had the opportunity to work on the cutting-edge Siemens 7T Terra MRI scanner.
Huang obtained both his Bachelor of Science in Physics and PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Cambridge.
Find out more about him here.
PUBLICATIONS
Huang Yunying, Scientist
Huang Yunying's research interests are focused on understanding how the brain evolves across the human lifespan and its capacity for reorganisation in response to experience, injury, and environmental factors. She is particularly interested in exploring how these processes unfold at different stages of life and how they can be harnessed for therapeutic interventions with multimodal imaging techniques. By combining methods such as MRI, EEG and NIRS, and MRI, she hopes to develop a more complementary and comprehensive understanding of brain dynamics.
Huang has studied brain plasticity during motor skill learning, investigating how cortical motor areas reorganise as skills transition from novel to automated in healthy participants. Using a combination of EEG and optical imaging (fNIRS & EROS), she has explored the dynamic changes in neural activity associated with motor learning. Additionally, she has worked with stroke patients, employing EEG and fMRI neurofeedback to induce targeted brain reorganisation as a potential adjunct to rehabilitation, aiming to enhance recovery and functional outcomes.
Her project on applying multimodal neurofeedback with stroke patients was selected for a presentation during the highlight session of the 25th European Stroke Conference in 2016 and also earned two student travel awards: One from Kellogg College (University of Oxford) in 2016 and another from the Real-Time Functional Imaging and Neurofeedback Conference in 2015.
Huang obtained her Bachelor degree in Psychology and Master's degree in Social Science (Research) at the National University of Singapore, and did her DPhil in Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford.
Michelle Kee, Principal Scientist I
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
Desiree Phua, Senior Scientist II
Desiree Phua's research focuses on positive mental health in parents and children/youths, the effects of the social environment on children’s and youths’ mental/emotional well-being, and the interplay of biology and social environment on individuals’ well-being. Her work with GUSTO involves tracking children’s physical, mental and emotional development from the time they were in their mothers’ wombs until present-day prepubescents.
Phua's PhD project was on the interplay of genetics, epigenetics and multicultural experiences, which also integrated social psychology and molecular biology. Intimately involved in every stage of the project – from grant writing, research design, data collection, to processing DNA samples, analysing genetic data to manuscript writing – the project was significant because it was a naturalistic study of stress and adaptation with hundreds of participants, including a control group.
She received the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Travel Award in 2016, and the International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium Student Travel Award in 2013.
Phua obtained both her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and PhD from the Nanyang Technological University.
Find out more about her here.
PUBLICATIONS
Setoh Pei Pei, Senior Principal Scientist II
In addition to her role at A*STAR IHDP, Setoh Pei Pei is also an Associate Professor (with tenure) at Nanyang Technological University's (NTU Singapore) School of Social Sciences and Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Director of the NTU Singapore's Early Cognition Lab, and lead of the GUSTO Social Science Team.
She is a developmental psychologist, and her research goal is to see children thrive and achieve their potential. To achieve this, her research examines parenting and children’s developmental outcomes.
Currently leading three projects aligned with these research aims, Setoh is the Principal Investigator of: i) Children’s Intelligence Mindsets: Promoting Gender Diversity in STEM, funded by Ministry of Education’s 2019 Social Science Research Humanities Research Fellowship; ii) The Development of Altruism in Young Children, and iii) Maximising human potential: Trajectories of Thriving for Mothers and Children, funded by Ministry of Education’s 2020 and 2022 Academic Research Fund Tier 1 Grant.
Setoh’s research has been published in top academic journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Directions in Psychological Science, and Child Development. Her research work 'Parenting by Lying' has been featured by the BBC and Channel NewsAsia, and her work on racial harmony and infant cognition has been featured by The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore Tonight, Today Online, and Asian Scientist.
She received her Bachelor of Social Science degree in Psychology from the National University of Singapore, her Master's in Developmental Psychology from NTU Singapore, and her Master's and PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Find out more about her here.
PUBLICATIONS
- Filial piety across sociocultural context and the lifespan.
Current Directions in Psychological Science. First published online January 30, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214241312630
Elaine Tham, Scientist
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
A*STAR celebrates International Women's Day
From groundbreaking discoveries to cutting-edge research, our researchers are empowering the next generation of female science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) leaders.
Get inspired by our #WomeninSTEM