OUR RESEARCHERS

A principal investigator at SICS, 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 SICS’ 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.


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. 

David Cameron-Smith is a senior principal investigator at SICS and he leads research on dietary protein and lipid metabolism at CNRC. He earned his professorship at The University of Auckland where he was the Chair in Nutrition at the Liggins Institute.

As the author of over 230 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of nutritional clinical interventions (with complementary analysis of health impacts in areas of obesity, diabetes and ageing, using advanced analytics including lipidomics, metabolomics and transcriptomics), his research work aims to decipher how nutrition regulates genes and the biochemical pathways that are essential for optimal human health. He has led significant clinical trials that have shed light on the role of protein in the diet of the elderly, the differences in metabolic response to differing proteins, and the differences between intolerances to dairy, as compared to lactose intolerance.

At SICS, Cameron-Smith’s research group is focused on building the scientific evidence for Future Foods, a part A*STAR funding and expansion of the Singapore Food Story. This is a research strategy to extend Singapore’s capabilities in advanced biotech-based food manufacturing, with the aim of providing clinically validated food solutions that improve health in the face of challenges such as rising metabolic disease and an ageing population.

He received his PhD in nutritional biochemistry from the Deakin University in Australia. Following postdoctoral training at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, he returned to an academic appointment at the School of Health Sciences in Deakin University.

Find out more about him here.

PUBLICATIONS

• Intramuscular inflammatory and resolving lipid profile responses to an acute bout of resistance exercise in men.
  Physiol Rep. 2019 Aug;7(13):e14108. doi: 10.14814/phy2.14108.

• Altered Dairy Protein Intake Does Not Alter Circulatory Branched Chain Amino Acids in Healthy Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial.
  Nutrients. 2018 Oct 15;10(10). pii: E1510. doi: 10.3390/nu10101510.

• Impact of dairy protein during limb immobilization and recovery on muscle size and protein synthesis; a randomized controlled trial.
  J Appl Physiol (1985). 2018 Mar 1;124(3):717-728. doi: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00803.2017. Epub 2017 Nov 9.

Bobby Cheon is a principal investigator at SICS, as well as an assistant professor in the School of Social Sciences (Psychology) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

His research examines how cultural, social and psychological influences affect human appetite and eating behaviour and lead to a diverse range of processes and behaviours linked to appetite, such as cognitions and expectations about foods, food preferences, portion selection, taste-based perception of foods, and food consumption patterns.

He is particularly interested in the psychological and behavioural processes that contribute to social disparities in obesity and diet-related chronic diseases. As an experimental social psychologist, Cheon also conducts research pertaining to social cohesion and resilience in response to perceived threats to one’s group.

Among his most significant research are studies are how the mere experience of low subjective socioeconomic status stimulates appetite and food intake and how implicit goals of satiety guide portion selection and food intake patterns. In 2017, he was awarded the Michael Harris Bond Award for Early Career Contributions by the Asian Association of Social Psychology, and the Rising Star Recognition by the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

He completed his PhD in Psychology at Northwestern University, and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Culture Science Institute of Nanyang Business School prior to joining SICS.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Avoiding hunger or approaching fullness? Implicit theories of satiety guide portion selection and food intake patterns.
  Appetite. 2019. (128): 10-16.

• Low subjective socioeconomic status stimulates orexigenic hormone ghrelin: A randomized trial.
  Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2018 (89): 103-112.

• Mere experience of low subjective socioeconomic status stimulates appetite and food intake.
  Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Jan 3;114(1):72-77. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1607330114. Epub 2016 Dec 19.

Mary Chong is a principal investigator at SICS and an assistant professor at NUS’ Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health. A clinical dietitian by training, she is the nutrition lead for the GUSTO study and a co-investigator and collaborator on three adult weight loss dietary intervention studies.

Specialising in the area of nutrition through the life course, her research focuses on maternal and infant nutrition and nutrition related to metabolic diseases and cardiovascular health. She also has a special interest in eating behaviour and appetite regulation, and has been exploring this aspect in both children and adults in the GUSTO study and weight loss studies respectively.

In 2019, she was presented with the NUS School of Public Health Faculty Young Researcher Award 2018/2019 and The Nutrition Society Silver Medal Award for scientific excellence in the field of nutrition (International award).

She pursued her PhD studies at the University of Oxford, U.K. in the area of lipid and carbohydrate metabolism, where she conducted feeding studies and used stable isotopes to trace the metabolism of various sugars and lipid fractions. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Hugh Sinclair Human Nutrition Unit of the University of Reading, U.K., she conducted a large-scale dietary intervention study, investigating the impact of flavonoids in fruit and vegetables on cardiovascular risk markers.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Relationships of maternal folate and vitamin B12 status during pregnancy with perinatal depression: The GUSTO study.
  J Psychiatr Res. 2014 Aug;55:110-6. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2014.04.006. Epub 2014 Apr 16.
  

• The association of maternal vitamin D status with infant birth outcomes, postnatal growth and adiposity in the first 2 years of life in a multi-ethnic Asian population: the Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes (GUSTO) cohort study.
  Br J Nutr. 2016 Aug;116(4):621-31. doi: 10.1017/S0007114516000623. Epub 2016 Jun 24.
  

• 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.

Maria De Iorio is a principal investigator and senior biostatistics consultant at SICS, a professor of science at Yale-NUS College, and a professor of biostatistics in the Department of Statistical Science at the University College London. Her previous appointments were as a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Oxford and lecturer/senior lecturer at the Imperial College London.

De Iorio’s research interests include Bayesian statistics and how to apply Bayesian methods to analyse data, Bayesian nonparametrics, biostatistics and computational methods, medical statistics, genomics, and metabolomics. She boasts an impressive track record in modelling complex biomedical data and analysing high throughput data in genomics and metabolomics.

She obtained her undergraduate degree in economics from Bocconi University, Italy, and her MSc and PhD in statistics from Duke University in the U.S.

PUBLICATIONS

• Monte Carlo co-ordinate ascent variational inference. 
  Stat Comput 30, 887–905 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11222-020-09924-yA

• Simulation Approach for Change-Points on Phylogenetic Trees.
  J Comput Biol. 2015 Jan 1; 22(1): 10–24. doi: 10.1089/cmb.2014.0218.

• Bayesian inference for duplication-mutation with complementarity network models.
  J Comput Biol. 2015 Nov;22(11):1025-33. doi: 10.1089/cmb.2015.0072. Epub 2015 Sep 10.

Marielle Valerie Fortier wears many hats. Besides her role as principal investigator at SICS, she’s also a clinical associate professor with Duke-NUS Medical School, as well as a senior consultant and the Head of MRI and Paediatric Ultrasound, Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Imaging at KK Women's and Children's Hospital.

She’s involved in research work for the GUSTO and S-PRESTO cohort studies, which involve imaging to assess neurocognitive development and to determine early markers for metabolic disease such as diabetes mellitus. In addition, she has an interest in advanced CT and MRI techniques that contribute to management of children with vascular disorders and congenital heart disease.

Fortier obtained her Doctor of Medicine from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and was subsequently board certified as a diagnostic radiologist in the U.S.

Find out more about her here.

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 Aug 27;dyaa143. doi: 10.1093/ije/dyaa143. Online ahead of print.

• Inflammatory modulation of the associations between prenatal maternal depression and neonatal brain.
  Neuropsychopharmacology. 2020 Jul 20. doi: 10.1038/s41386-020-0774-0. Online ahead of print.

• 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.

A principal investigator under SICS' Human Development programme, Jonathan Huang also helms the Biostatistics platform where he leads a team providing epidemiological and biostatistical support for ongoing and planned birth cohort studies at the institute.

Together with his team, he aims to adapt and apply cutting-edge methods to complex data to study maternal, child, and adolescent health. These methods include longitudinal causal inference approaches to investigate developmental mechanisms and estimate potential benefits of early life interventions, and principled consideration of machine learning algorithms for developing and testing prediction models for maternal and child outcomes. 

Significant projects Huang is involved in include using simulation models and machine learning to estimate effects of hypothetical interventions to improve child growth and metabolism incorporating data on potential epigenetic mechanisms; and using machine learning approaches to improve prediction of maternal mood (depression and anxiety) in pregnancy as part of a broader project looking at maternal mental health and pregnancy and child outcomes. He’s also leading collaboration efforts with investigators at several U.S. universities to look at the effects of environmental pollutants – including air pollution and chemical contaminants found in food and water – on pregnancy outcomes and child development.

Huang obtained his PhD at the University of Washington, and did his postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University.

PUBLICATIONS

• Maternal Education in Early Life and Risk of Metabolic Syndrome in Young Adult American Females and Males: Disentangling Life Course Processes Through Causal Models.
  Epidemiology. 2019 Nov;30 Suppl 2:S28-S36. doi: 10.1097/EDE.0000000000001068.

• Maternal Peripartum Serum DDT/E and Urinary Pyrethroid Metabolite Concentrations and Child Infections at 2 Years in the VHEMBE Birth Cohort.
  Environ Health Perspect. 2018 Jun 14;126(6):067006. doi: 10.1289/EHP2657. eCollection 2018 Jun.

• Maternal gestational weight gain and DNA methylation in young women: application of life course mediation methods.
  Epigenomics. 2017 Dec;9(12):1559-1571. doi: 10.2217/epi-2017-0085. Epub 2017 Nov 6.

Neerja Karnani is a senior principal investigator and systems biology lead at SICS. 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.

Brian Kennedy is a senior principal investigator at SICS, a professor at Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, a distinguished professor in Biochemistry and Physiology and Director of the Centre for Healthy Ageing at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

His primary research focuses on translating research discoveries into new ways of delaying, detecting, preventing and treating human ageing and its associated diseases. The approach is multifaceted. Animal models are used to make new discoveries about ageing biology and also to develop translational interventions targeting ageing pathways, and uman studies are then used to validate and extend the discoveries, as well as the interventions.  

Through his work, Kennedy seeks to demonstrate that ageing interventions can be successfully employed in humans to extend healthspan – the disease-free and highly functional period of life. His goal is to produce world-class preclinical research to better understand the biology of ageing and community-based approaches to improve health quality with ageing in Singapore.

Kennedy received his PhD in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.

Find out more about him here.

PUBLICATIONS

• Muscle-specific 4E-BP1 signaling activation improves metabolic parameters during aging and obesity.
  J Clin Invest. 2015 Aug 3;125(8):2952-64. doi: 10.1172/JCI77361. Epub 2015 Jun 29.

• Rapamycin reverses elevated mTORC1 signaling in lamin A/C-deficient mice, rescues cardiac and skeletal muscle function, and extends survival.
  Sci Transl Med. 2012 Jul 25;4(144):144ra103. doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3003802.

• Quantitative evidence for conserved longevity pathways between divergent eukaryotic species.
  Genome Res. 2008 Apr;18(4):564-70. doi: 10.1101/gr.074724.107. Epub 2008 Mar 13.

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 SICS, 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

• Gut microbiota changes in children with autism spectrum disorder: a systematic review.
  Gut Pathog. 2020 Feb 3;12:6. doi: 10.1186/s13099-020-0346-1. eCollection 2020.

• The parenting experiences and needs of Asian primary caregivers of children with autism: A meta-synthesis.
  Autism. 2019 Nov 13:1362361319886513. doi: 10.1177/1362361319886513. [Epub ahead of print]

• Television viewing and child cognition in a longitudinal birth cohort in Singapore: the role of maternal factors.
  BMC Pediatr. 2019 Aug 16;19(1):286. doi: 10.1186/s12887-019-1651-z.

Lee Yung Seng is a paediatric endocrinologist practicing at Khoo Teck Puat-National University Children's Medical Institute, National University Hospital (NUH). He’s also the head of NUH’s Department of Paediatrics, a professor at the NUS Yong Long Lin School of Medicine, and a principal investigator at SICS – an appointment he has held since 2009.

Intrigued by the increasing numbers of obese young children visiting his clinic, Lee’s research interests lie within paediatrics and endocrinology, particularly in monogenic forms of childhood obesity, complications of childhood obesity, developmental origins of adiposity and obesity risk. He’s one of the lead investigators for the GUSTO birth cohort study and led a study on sleep in children in association with adiposity.

Over the last decade, he and his team(s) have successfully identified rare and common genetic variants in their paediatric cohort with early-onset obesity using a candidate gene approach, with the pathogenic roles supported by in-vitro functional studies. They were the first in the world to report an MC3R (a protein in humans encoded by the MC3R gene) mutation associated with human obesity. He has won awards for scientific papers such as Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity in Chinese Preschoolers in Singapore and Normative Data for Quantitative Calcaneal Ultrasound in Asian Children.

Lee received his MBBS, MMed (Paediatrics) and PhD from the National University of Singapore, and his MRCP and FRCPCH from the United Kingdom’s Royal College of Physicians and Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health respectively.

Find out more about him here.

PUBLICATIONS

• A POMC variant implicates beta-melanocyte-stimulating hormone in the control of human energy balance. 
  Cell Metab, 2006 Feb; 3(2):135-40.

• The role of melanocortin 3 receptor gene in childhood obesity.
  Diabetes. 2007 Oct;56(10):2622-30.

• Effect of maternal glycemia on neonatal adiposity in a multiethnic Asian birth cohort.
  J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2014 Jan;99(1): 240-7.

Melvin Leow is a senior principal investigator at SICS, an associate professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), a clinical associate professor at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, an adjunct associate 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.

Evelyn Loo is a principal investigator at SICS and 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.

Tan Ai Peng is a principal investigator with SICS and a consultant neuroradiologist at the Department of Diagnostic Imaging, National University Hospital and National University Cancer Institute Singapore. She also holds the appointment of assistant professor at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine – NUS.

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

• MRI Protocol for Craniosynostosis: Replacing Ionizing Radiation-Based CT.
  AJR Am J Roentgenol. 2019 Dec;213(6):1374-1380. doi: 10.2214/AJR.19.21746. Epub 2019 Sep 18.

• Venous pathologies in paediatric neuroradiology: from foetal to adolescent life.
  Neuroradiology. 2020 Jan;62(1):15-37. doi: 10.1007/s00234-019-02294-x. Epub 2019 Nov 9.

• "Restricted Diffusion" within the Splenium of the Corpus Callosum: A Potential Pitfall in Young Infants on 3T Imaging and Marker of Normal Myelin Maturation.
  Neuropediatrics. 2019 Jun;50(3):146-151. doi: 10.1055/s-0039-1679899. Epub 2019 Mar 15.

Elizabeth Tham is a principal investigator with SICS, a consultant paediatrician and Head of Division, Division of Allergy, Immunology and Rheumatology at Khoo Teck Puat – National University Children’s Medical Institute, and assistant professor at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine – NUS.

In her clinical practice, she sees all general paediatric conditions with a special focus on children with allergic disorders such as atopic dermatitis, allergic rhinitis, asthma, food and drug allergies. She is particularly passionate about improving the care and quality of life for children suffering from atopic dermatitis or eczema.

Tham is also a clinician-scientist actively involved in research related to the fields of allergy, immunology and the skin microbiome in atopic dermatitis. She has been awarded several national grants, such as the National Medical Research Council’s (NMRC) Clinician Scientist - Individual Research Grant - New Investigator Grant, the NMRC Research Training Fellowship and the NMRC Transition Award. Her work has been published in many regional and international journals.

A mentor who enjoys teaching medical students and her junior colleagues, Tham was awarded the Annual Teaching Excellence Award from the Department of Paediatrics. As a mother of three, she understands and empathises with many of the parenting struggles that Singaporean parents face today.

Tham graduated with a MBBS from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine – NUS in 2007 and was awarded the Jane Prize in Paediatrics. She received her specialist training in Paediatrics and Neonatology at the National University Hospital and KK Women's and Children's Hospital.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Early introduction of allergenic foods for the prevention of food allergy from an Asian perspective-An Asia Pacific Association of Pediatric Allergy, Respirology & Immunology (APAPARI) consensus statement.
  Pediatr Allergy Immunol. 2018 Feb;29(1):18-27. doi: 10.1111/pai.12820.

• Low Food Allergy Prevalence Despite Delayed Introduction of Allergenic Foods-Data from the GUSTO Cohort.
  J Allergy Clin Immunol Pract. Mar-Apr 2018;6(2):466-475.e1. doi: 10.1016/j.jaip.2017.06.001. Epub 2017 Jul 19.

• Erratum to: Antiviral activity of Lactobacillus reuteri Protectis against Coxsackievirus A and Enterovirus 71 infection in human skeletal muscle and colon cell lines.
  Virol J. 2016; 13: 186. Published online 2016 Nov 17. doi: 10.1186/s12985-016-0633-0.
  

A senior principal investigator at SICS, S. Sendhil Velan is also Head of the Metabolic Imaging Group at the Singapore Bioimaging Consortium (A*STAR), and 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.

A principal investigator with both SICS and A*STAR’s Bioinformatics Institute, Dennis Wang is also the lead for SICS’ Bioinformatics platform. Additionally, he holds the position of Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Genomic Medicine and Machine Learning at The University of Sheffield, and is Honorary Faculty at The University of Liverpool’s Department of Molecular and Clinical Pharmacology.

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.

Chen Li is a research scientist at SICS, and her 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.

A research scientist with SICS, Varsha Gupta is part of the Bioinformatics team. Her area of expertise lies in inventing and developing algorithms for longitudinal data analysis and data related to spectral and imaging studies; understanding underlying data dimensions and structures; machine learning; computer vision; pattern recognition; clustering; predictions; and risk analysis.

She plays a significant role in developing and applying mathematical models to clinical data for large-scale studies like GUSTO. Her notable projects include trajectories of maternal mood symptoms influence the course of childhood anxiety during development by gene environment interactions; identification of growth patterns in GUSTO children and associated risk factors; and study effects of gene-lipids interactions on prenatal maternal moods.

Gupta obtained her Bachelor of Science, Master of Science and PhD in Physics from the University of Delhi, and has been with SICS since 2014.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

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

• Population-Based Stroke Atlas for Outcome Prediction: Method and Preliminary Results for Ischemic Stroke from CT.
  PLoS One. 2014; 9(8): e102048. Published online 2014 Aug 14. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0102048.

• Automatic detection, localization, and volume estimation of ischemic infarcts in noncontrast computed tomographic scans: method and preliminary results.
  Invest Radiol. 2013 Sep;48(9):661-70. doi: 10.1097/RLI.0b013e31828d8403.

Narasimhan Kothandaraman is a research scientist at SICS. He 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.

A research scientist with SICS' Human Development programme, Keri McCrickerd is a research psychologist specialising in eating behaviour. She’s also 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 SICS 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.
  

A research scientist with SICS, Navin Michael is part of the Metabolic Imaging group which lends its expertise in magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy to studies in the human development programme.

Michael’s research interests lie in growth and metabolism, developmental origins of cardiometabolic and cardiorenal disease, imaging intrahepatic and intramyocellular lipids, kidney functional imaging, gestational diabetes and progression to type 2 diabetes. Key projects he has worked on include investigating links between poor foetal growth and poor foetoplacental blood flow with kidney function; childhood growth trajectories, their predictors and links to cardiometabolic outcomes; and determinants of intramyocellular accumulation in early childhood in Asian children.

He received the second prize for Best Oral Presentation at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) Paediatric Study Group Meeting in 2016, the Magna Cum Laude Award from ISMRM in 2015, and the Merlion PhD Scholarship (2007 to 2011) from the Embassy of France.

Michael obtained his Bachelor of Technology, Information and Communication Technology from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in India, and his PhD from the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.


PUBLICATIONS

• 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.

Pan Hong is a research scientist with SICS’ Bioinformatics programme. Her 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 SICS, Pan was with A*STAR’s Genome Institute of Singapore and 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.

Having been with SICS since 2010, Suresh Anand Sadananthan is a research scientist with SICS’ 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 SICS 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.

Mya Thway Tint is a research scientist at SICS and 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.
  

Candida Vaz has been a research scientist with SICS since 2018. Prior to joining SICS, 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 SICS 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.

Zhang Han is a research scientist with SICS.

Her 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.

Holding the unique position of research clinician under SICS’ Human Development programme, 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.

A research fellow under the Human Development programme at SICS, Derrick Johnston Alperet is also a visiting scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

His scientific repertoire includes in vitro/animal model studies, cross-sectional studies, case-control studies, prospective cohort studies and placebo-controlled double-blind randomised trials, and his research interests centre on obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease prevention. Alperet has been lead author for several papers, and his findings have been published in top international journals including the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and Obesity.

An A*STAR scholar, he was awarded the A*STAR International Fellowship Award in 2017, the Paul Dudley White International Scholar Award by the American Heart Association in 2018, and in the same year, he took home the third prize at the Harvard-MIT Consulting Case Competition organised by the Harvard Graduate Consulting Club & Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Consulting Club as well.

Alperet obtained both his Bachelor of Science with Honours and his PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from the National University of Singapore. He did his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in the field of nutrition and epidemiology investigating dietary strategies for obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevention.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• The effect of coffee consumption on insulin sensitivity and other biological risk factors for type 2 diabetes: a randomized placebo-controlled trial.
  Am J Clin Nutr. 2020 Feb 1;111(2):448-458. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/nqz306.

• Influence of temperate, subtropical, and tropical fruit consumption on risk of type 2 diabetes in an Asian population.
  Am J Clin Nutr. 2017 Mar;105(3):736-745. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.116.147090. Epub 2017 Feb 8.

• Optimal anthropometric measures and thresholds to identify undiagnosed type 2 diabetes in three major Asian ethnic groups.
  Obesity (Silver Spring). 2016 Oct;24(10):2185-93. doi: 10.1002/oby.21609. Epub 2016 Aug 25.

A research fellow with SICS’ Translational Neuroscience programme, 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

• Post-inflammatory behavioural despair in male mice is associated with reduced cortical glutamate-glutamine ratios, and circulating lipid and energy metabolites.
  Sci Rep. 2020 Oct 8;10(1):16857. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-74008-w.

• Heterogeneity of outcomes and network connectivity in early stage psychosis: a longitudinal study. Schizophrenia Bulletin.
  Schizophr Bull. 2021 Jan 23;47(1):138-148. doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbaa079.

• A single administration of the antibiotic, minocycline, reduces fear processing and improves implicit learning in healthy volunteers: analysis of the serum metabolome.
  Transl Psychiatry. 2020 May 13;10(1):148. doi: 10.1038/s41398-020-0818-6.

A research fellow with the Translational Neuroscience programme at SICS, 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

• Bacteria evoke alarm behaviour in zebrafish.
  Nat Commun. 2019 Aug 23;10(1):3831. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-11608-9.

Jacqueline Chin is a research fellow with the Translational Neuroscience programme at SICS. She previously did a postdoctoral fellowship with the Florida Atlantic University where she worked closely with top researchers in the zebrafish neuroscience field to investigate genes and neural circuits underlying stress and anxiety.

Her research interests lie in understanding how stress and early life adversity affect the brain and behaviour. In her previous appointment, she was able to establish the evolutionary basis of stress behaviours by utilising in vivo calcium imaging of neural activity using the two-photon microscope and computational methods to analyse neural clusters in Mexican blind cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus). At SICS, she hopes to take it a step further by studying human and mammalian data, and investigating what makes an individual more resilient than others to stress.

Significant projects she has been involved in include developing a zebrafish model of early life stress that showed long-lasting anxiety into adulthood. The model can be used to study alterations in whole-brain activity due to early life stress, and the set-up can be varied to generate zebrafish adults that are more resilient to stress. In another study, using two morphs of a single small fish species, Astyanax mexicanus, she showed that the Mexican blind cavefish have increased anxiety compared to its surface-dwelling eyed morphs. Together with new genetic tools such as CRISPR, sequenced genomes, and brain atlases of various cave morphs, this study allows for the understanding of evolutionary drives and mechanisms underlying stress.

Chin obtained her Bachelor of Science with Honours from the Nanyang Technological University and her PhD in Biological Sciences from the National University of Singapore.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Analysis of stress responses in Astyanaxlarvae reveal heterogeneity among different populations.
  J Exp Zool B Mol Dev Evol. 2020 Aug 6. doi: 10.1002/jez.b.22987. Online ahead of print.

• Behavioral Approaches to Studying Innate Stress in Zebrafish.
  J Vis Exp. 2019 May 1;(147). doi: 10.3791/59092.

• Convergence on reduced stress behavior in the Mexican blind cavefish.
  Dev Biol. 2018 Sep 15;441(2):319-327. doi: 10.1016/j.ydbio.2018.05.009. Epub 2018 May 25.
  

A senior research fellow under the Biostatistics platform at SICS, Andrea Cremaschi’s field of expertise is in statistical modelling for biomedical applications, developing methodologies in the field of Bayesian Statistics (often including nonparametric aspects), graphical models, and analysis of datasets involving variables of diverse nature.

His research interests include both the methodological and applied aspects of statistics – particularly within the Bayesian framework, Bayesian nonparametrics, the use of flexible mixture models for inference in scenarios where the data present peculiar features, concern model-based cluster analysis, and the use of graphical models for inference in dataset characterised by a sparse dependency. Besides analysing data from GUSTO in the neuroscience and metabolic fields, he also works on manuscripts with collaborators to develop novel methodologies in the field of Bayesian nonparametric statistics with applications. He received an honourable mention for the Lindley Prize by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) in 2019.

Cremaschi obtained his Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Mathematical Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan, and his PhD in Statistics from the University of Kent in the U.K. He did his postdoctoral fellowship in at the Yale-NUS College.


PUBLICATIONS

• An in vitro assay for biomarker discovery and dose prediction applied to ibrutinib plus venetoclax treatment of CLL.
  Leukemia. 2020 Feb;34(2):478-487. doi: 10.1038/s41375-019-0569-7. Epub 2019 Aug 30.

• Hierarchical Normalized Completely Random Measures for Robust Graphical Modeling.
  Bayesian Anal. 2019 Dec;14(4):1271-1301. doi: 10.1214/19-ba1153. Epub 2019 Mar 28.

• Single cell profiling of phospho-protein levels in chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
  Oncotarget. 2018 Jan 4;9(10):9273-9284. doi: 10.18632/oncotarget.23949. eCollection 2018 Feb 6.

Anna Fogel is a senior research fellow with SICS under the Human Development programme.

With a keen interest in behavioural and psychosocial factors pertaining to (un)healthy growth in childhood, her 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 senior research fellow with SICS’ Human Development programme, Gong Min specialises in non-coding RNAs and their role in epigenetic editing, integrative analysis of next generation sequencing data, and developing comprehensive approaches to identify and validate biomarkers for metabolic diseases.

Significant projects she’s worked on include iOmics approach to identify molecular determinants of GDM; circular RNA regulates ROS and angiogenesis signalling in preterm birth; and circular RNA in metabolic remodelling.

Gong obtained her Bachelor of Clinical Medicine from Tongji Medical College, her master’s degree from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and her PhD from the National University of Singapore.

Find out more about her here.

PUBLICATIONS

• Oncogenic KRAS-associated gene signature defines co-targeting of CDK4/6 and MEK as a viable therapeutic strategy in colorectal cancer.
  Oncogene. 2017 Aug 31;36(35):4975-4986. doi: 10.1038/onc.2017.120. Epub 2017 May 1.

• 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.

• RASAL2 activates RAC1 to promote triple-negative breast cancer progression.
  J Clin Invest. 2014 Dec;124(12):5291-304. doi: 10.1172/JCI76711. Epub 2014 Nov 10.

A research fellow under the Biostatistics platform at SICS, Huang Jian’s research interests lie in molecular epidemiology and he has a wealth of experience in multiomics data analysis and causal analysis using Mendelian randomisation.

As part of his doctorate thesis, Huang worked on epigenetic projects using a population cohort at Columbia University from 2017 to 2018. After obtaining his PhD, Jian joined the UK Dementia Research Institute at the Imperial College London as a postdoctoral research associate to investigate the causal relationship of lifestyle factors and molecular biomarkers with risk of Alzheimer's disease.

At SICS, Huang investigates the causal relationship of maternal and early-life exposure with neurodevelopment in children, and its underlying mechanisms. He also collaborates with Imperial College London on projects related to the molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Huang obtained a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy from Jinan University, and his Master of Public Health and PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from The University of Hong Kong.

Find out more about him here. 


PUBLICATIONS

• Sleep, major depressive disorder and Alzheimer's disease: A Mendelian randomisation study.
  Neurology. 2020 Oct 6;95(14):e1963-e1970. doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000010463. Epub 2020 Aug 19.

• A population-based phenome-wide association study of cardiac and aortic structure and function.
  Nat Med. 2020 Oct;26(10):1654-1662. doi: 10.1038/s41591-020-1009-y. Epub 2020 Aug 24.

• The association of air pollution with body mass index: evidence from Hong Kong's “Children of 1997” birth cohort.
  Int J Obes (Lond). 2019 Jan;43(1):62-72. doi: 10.1038/s41366-018-0070-9. Epub 2018 Apr 23.

Huang Pei is a research fellow under the Translational Neuroscience programme at SICS, and 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

• Improved motion correction of submillimetre 7T fMRI time series with Boundary-Based Registration (BBR).
  Neuroimage. 2020 Apr 15;210:116542. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116542. Epub 2020 Jan 18.

• Prospective motion correction improves the sensitivity of fMRI pattern decoding.
  Hum Brain Mapp. 2018 Oct;39(10):4018-4031. doi: 10.1002/hbm.24228. Epub 2018 Jun 8.

• Cell-cell adhesion and cortical actin bending govern cell elongation on negatively curved substrates.
  Biophys J. 2018 Apr 10;114(7):1707-1717. doi: 10.1016/j.bpj.2018.02.027.

A senior research fellow under the Translational Neuroscience programme at SICS, 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.

A senior research fellow under the Human Development programme at SICS, 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.

Patrick Lee is a research fellow under the Core Molecular Laboratory at SICS. His area of expertise lies in gene-environment interactions (GxE), specifically the molecular processes that govern these interactions. He has a special interest in gene regulation of early brain development (e.g. critical periods in sensory modalities).

Throughout Lee’s career, he has been involved in a variety of omics studies – genomics, epigenomics, proteomics and lipidomics. As part of the function of the Core Molecular Laboratory, he uses the skills and knowledge he has acquired to support and assist the various platforms in SICS, particularly when studying or understanding molecular mechanisms using cellular models.

Projects he has worked on include the establishment of cell lines from umbilical cord tissueFor the S-PRESTO and NiPPeR cohort studies; establishment of cell lines from umbilical cord tissue to be used for induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) generation and adipocyte differentiationIn the ‘Epigenetic Analysis of Mesenchymal Stem Cells and Human Vascular Endothelial Cells Isolated from Umbilical Cords of Babies with Low and High Birth Weight and/or born to mothers with Gestational Diabetes’ study; and transcriptome, lipidome, methylome and microbiome analyses for the non-human primate studies (e.g. Betamethasone treatment in adult Cynomolgus macaques as a model for human stress exposure).

Lee received the Travel Award for the 10th Meeting of the  Asia Pacific Society for Neurochemistry in Kao Hsiung, Taiwan (2014); the A*STAR SSDA (Scientific Staff Development Award) to pursue his part-time PhD in NUS (2011); the Travel Grant for (IBRO) – World Congress of Neuroscience in Florence, Italy (2010); and the Travel Award for Neuro2009, annual meeting of the Japanese Neuroscience Society and Japanese Society for Neurochemistry in Kobe, Japan (2009).

He obtained his Bachelor of Science from the University of Queensland and his PhD from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine – NUS.


PUBLICATIONS

• Network-based characterization of the synaptic proteome reveals that the removal of epigenetic regulator Prmt8 restricts proteins associated with synaptic maturation.
  J Neurochem. 2017 Feb;140(4):613-628. doi: 10.1111/jnc.13921. Epub 2017 Jan 30.

• Multi-function optogenetic stimulator and neural amplifier for wirelessly controlled neural interface.
  2015 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference (BioCAS). 07 December 2015. doi: 10.1109/BioCAS.2015.7348341.

• Crystal structures of two novel sulfonylurea herbicides in complex with Arabidopsis thaliana acetohydroxyacid synthase.
  FEBS J. 2009 Mar;276(5):1282-90. doi: 10.1111/j.1742-4658.2009.06863.x.

A senior research fellow with the Systems Biology team at SICS, Ives Lim specialises in DNA methylation of clinical samples and epigenetics analyses of high-throughput data such as microarrays or next-generation sequencing.

Projects he has been involved in include working on a cell type proportion reference paper where the team established a new cell type reference panel for DNA methylation in cord tissue; and the ATTRaCT (Asian neTwork for Translational Research and Cardiovascular Trails) study – a large heart failure study with data from the clinic, biochemical data, genomic, as well as MRI data. He integrated all these different datasets into a common indexable database, establishing a baseline that other researchers can use.

Lim obtained both his Bachelor of Science and his PhD in Medicine from the National University of Singapore.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• Developmental pathways to adiposity begin before birth and are influenced by genotype, prenatal environment and epigenome.
  BMC Med. 2017 Mar 7;15(1):50. doi: 10.1186/s12916-017-0800-1.

• Cell type-specific DNA methylation in neonatal cord tissue and cord blood: a 850K-reference panel and comparison of cell types.
  Epigenetics. 2018;13(9):941-958. doi: 10.1080/15592294.2018.1522929. Epub 2018 Oct 11.

• Choice of surrogate tissue influences neonatal EWAS findings.
  BMC Med. 2017 Dec 5;15(1):211. doi: 10.1186/s12916-017-0970-x.

Priti Mishra is a research fellow with the Human Development programme at SICS.

Her 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 SICS. 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.

Desiree Phua is a senior research fellow with the Translational Neuroscience programme at SICS.  

Her 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

• Positive Maternal Mental Health, Parenting, and Child Development.
  Biol Psychiatry. 2020 Feb 15;87(4):328-337. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2019.09.028. Epub 2019 Oct 16.

• 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.

• Effects of bonding with parents and home culture on intercultural adaptations and the moderating role of genes.
  Behav Brain Res. 2017 May 15;325(Pt B):223-236. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2017.02.012. Epub 2017 Feb 12.

A research fellow with SICS’ Human Development programme, Sim Choon Kiat is a geneticist under the Systems Biology cluster at the institute.

After obtaining his PhD, he was with SICS for four years before being seconded to the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in the U.S. for four years as a visiting fellow. During his stint at NHGRI, Sim studied the problems of the microbiome and hospital-acquired infections from the perspective of microbial populations in the skin and gut, using techniques involving genomics, genetic cloning, high-throughput DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, cell culture, mouse models and analysis of human samples. While he was at SICS – prior to his secondment – he focused on fat cell differentiation and how it could give rise to obesity.

When pursuing his doctorate, he was part of a team that studied the carbon dioxide receptor responsible for a variety of responses ranging from avoidance in flies to attraction towards human hosts in mosquitoes that transmit deadly diseases. The project was completed within 1.5 years and published in the peer-reviewed journal Genes & Development.

Sim obtained his Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Michigan and his PhD in Genetics from the Stanford University School of Medicine. During his time at Stanford, he did a month-long summer course in powering innovation and entrepreneurship that’s aimed at guiding students through the start-up process of developing an idea into a product that is marketable to a panel of venture capitalists.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• A fluorescent light-up probe with AIE characteristics for specific mitochondrial imaging to identify differentiating brown adipose cells.
  Chem Commun (Camb). 2014 Aug 7;50(61):8312-5.doi: 10.1039/c4cc00452c.

• Regulation of white and brown adipocyte differentiation by RhoGAP DLC1.
  PLoS One. 2017 Mar 30;12(3):e0174761. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0174761. eCollection 2017.

• Epigenetic regulation of olfactory receptor gene expression by the Myb-MuvB/dREAM complex.
  Genes Dev. 2012 Nov 15;26(22):2483-98.doi: 10.1101/gad.201665.112.Epub 2012 Oct 26.
  

A research fellow under SICS’ Human Development programme, 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.

A senior research fellow under the Human Development programme at SICS, 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.

A senior research fellow with SICS' Human Development programme, Jeannie Tay previously worked as a clinical dietitian in a variety of tertiary and community healthcare settings. Her interests and expertise are in weight management and renal dietetics, although she was also involved in the dietary management of patients from a variety of disciplines – geriatrics, cardiology, oncology, palliative care, gastroenterology and surgery.

She gave media interviews, wrote nutrition articles, as well as delivered nutrition talks and workshops to students, the elderly, renal patients and corporate clients such as teachers from the Ministry of Education and Singapore Armed Forces officers. In addition, she rendered voluntary dietetic services to the Singapore Red Cross and Touch Diabetes Support Group. She was also involved in the ethics review of research studies conducted by the National Healthcare Group (NHG) and partner institutions, as part of the Office of Human Protection Program, at the Institutional Ethics Review Board, Research and Development Office, NHG.

Tay has received numerous awards, including the Almond Board of California Research grant in 2019, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham Diabetes Research Center travel award in 2017.

She obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Nutrition and Dietetics at the Flinders University of South Australia on a scholarship from the Ministry of Health, Singapore and graduated with First Class Honours, which she completed at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Food and Nutrition flagship in Adelaide, Australia. After working for a few years post-graduation, Tay pursued her PhD at the University of Adelaide on a National Science Scholarship from A*STAR. In 2016, she secured a postdoctoral fellow position at the Department of Nutrition Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham and returned to Singapore in 2019 to join SICS.


PUBLICATIONS

• Low-carbohydrate diets in type 2 diabetes.
  Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology 2019 (Invited Commentary, published online 15 Jan 2019). doi: 10.1016/S2213-8587(18)30368-1.

• Effects of an energy-restricted low-carbohydrate, high unsaturated fat/low saturated fat diet versus a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet in type 2 diabetes: A 2-year randomized clinical trial.
  Diabetes Obes Metab. 2018 Apr;20(4):858-871. doi: 10.1111/dom.13164. Epub 2017 Dec 20.

• Comparison of low- and high-carbohydrate diets for type 2 diabetes management: a randomized trial.
  Am J Clin Nutr. 2015 Oct;102(4):780-90. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.115.112581. Epub 2015 Jul 29.

Elaine Tham is a research fellow at SICS, 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.

A senior research fellow at SICS, 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 is a research fellow under the Human Development programme at SICS.

Her 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 fetal 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.