TRANSLATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE

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. 

Marielle Valerie Fortier wears many hats. Besides her role as joint 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.

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.

Besides her role with SICS, Tan Ai Peng is also 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 NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

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.

Lena Lim’s scientific work focuses on early-life stress – particularly the neural correlates of childhood maltreatment. She is interested in the neurobiological pathways between childhood trauma and the transition to psychiatric disorders and destructive behaviours, and how this may be moderated by genetic vulnerability. Her other research interests include self-harm and suicide in young people as well as childhood neurodevelopmental disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

She obtained her PhD (Child and Adolescent Psychiatry) and postdoctoral training from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London, U.K. She is also an Associate Fellow and Chartered Psychologist of the British Psychological Society (BPS), U.K.


PUBLICATIONS

• Aberrant structural connectivity in childhood maltreatment: A meta-analysis.
  Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2020 Sep;116:406-414. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.07.004. Epub 2020 Jul 10.

• Altered white matter connectivity in young people exposed to childhood abuse: A tract-based spatial statistic (TBSS) and tractography study.
  J Psychiatry Neurosci. 2019 Jul 1;44(4):E11-E20. doi: 10.1503/jpn.170241.

• Grey matter volume and thickness abnormalities in young people with a history of childhood abuse.
  Psychol Med. 2018 Apr;48(6):1034-1046. doi: 10.1017/S0033291717002392. Epub 2017 Nov 10.
  

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.

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.

In addition to his role at SICS, Huang Pei is also a visiting fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Multimodal Neuroimaging in Neuropsychiatric Disorders Laboratory. He spent a year at A*STAR’s Singapore Bioimaging Consortium before joining SICS.

His research interests include improving the quality of and utilising novel analysis methods on MRI data, which in turn may provide a better understanding and early detection of neuropsychiatric disorders and allow medical professionals to better quantify effectiveness of the treatments. While pursuing his PhD, he had the opportunity to work on the cutting-edge Siemens 7T Terra MRI scanner.

Huang obtained both his Bachelor of Science in Physics and PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Cambridge.

Find out more about him here.


PUBLICATIONS

• 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.

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.

Desiree Phua's research focuses on positive mental health in parents and children/youths, the effects of the social environment on children’s and youths’ mental/emotional well-being, and the interplay of biology and social environment on individuals’ well-being. Her work with GUSTO involves tracking children’s physical, mental and emotional development from the time they were in their mothers’ wombs until present-day prepubescents.

Phua's PhD project was on the interplay of genetics, epigenetics and multicultural experiences, which also integrated social psychology and molecular biology. Intimately involved in every stage of the project – from grant writing, research design, data collection, to processing DNA samples, analysing genetic data to manuscript writing – the project was significant because it was a naturalistic study of stress and adaptation with hundreds of participants, including a control group. 

She received the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Travel Award in 2016, and the International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium Student Travel Award in 2013.

Phua obtained both her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and PhD from the Nanyang Technological University.

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

• 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.

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

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

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

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

Find out more about her here.


PUBLICATIONS

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

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

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