Organising Committee
Member
Associate Professor Smita Singh
Senior Lecturer, Psychology
James Cook University Singapore
[email protected]
Scientific Review Committee
Chair
Associate Professor Smita Singh
Smita Singh (PhD) from JCU – Dr Smita Singh came to Singapore in 2005 and is now an Associate Professor of Psychology and Program Lead for Masters in Psychological Sciences at James Cook University, Singapore. She received a PhD in Psychology from the National University of Singapore in 2010 and an MPhil in Planning and Development from the IIT Bombay, India, in 2004. Her research interests cover a wide range of topics in social, educational, and organizational psychology. She has also conducted research and published in the field of well-being and mental health with students and colleagues. She has published in many international peer-reviewed journals, such as the European Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Frontiers of Psychology, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Public Health, and Heliyon.
Members
Professor Masood Zangeneh
Masood Zangeneh (PhD) from Humber College (Canada) - Dr. Masood Zangeneh is Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning, Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse and is a consultant to numerous scientific journals and universities for interdisciplinary, multi-cultural research and development addressing mental health, addiction and resilience among marginalized populations. Dr. Zangeneh has led numerous international collaborative programs and research initiatives; and, he has served as the Ben Gurion University (BGU) – Regional Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research (RADAR) Centre Visiting Professor addressing multi-ethnic youth resilience through research, training, education and publication.
Associate Professor. Chris Lo
Chris Lo (PhD) from JCU - Chris Lo is a researcher and educator in medical psychology, social psychiatry and social epidemiology. My work has concerned the improvement of quality of life and quality of care in patients and families coping with advanced disease, and development of supportive care interventions. This has included the use of implementation science approaches to develop psychoeducational interventions for rapid deployment in clinical settings to improve medical decision-making and planning for the end of life. A second strand of research has concerned the design and validation of patient-reported outcomes of quality of life/care for use in clinical trials and program evaluations. These have included measures of family satisfaction with care, quality of life at the end of life, death anxiety and existential distress. A third strand concerns issues of life course and aging, and social determinants of mental health across the lifespan, which may include family, community and cultural supports. My contributions have included modeling the relational system between patients and caregivers and their ability to make use of social connectedness to meet the challenges of advanced cancer; and discussion of a developmental perspective that explains individual differences in the readiness to face the end of life. I also have interests in quantitative and qualitative methods and their mixing, and the study of wider cultural issues concerning the evolution of self and identity over time.
Dr. Samuel Chng
Samuel Chng is a Senior Research Fellow and heads the Urban Psychology Lab in the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. He is also Deputy Lead for the Future-Ready Society programme. With the majority of the world's population residing in cities today, fostering urban lifestyles that contribute towards creating low-carbon, resilient, healthy and equitable cities becomes ever more critical. An applied social psychologist, his interdisciplinary work focuses on developing research-informed policies and initiatives to accelerate this transition in Singapore and the wider Asian region. He is a firm believer in translating academic research and capacity building, and so actively collaborates with partners in government, industry, the labour movement and media in this endeavour.
Dr. Joe Simons
Joe Simons (PhD) from A*STAR - Agency for Science, Technology and Research) – Dr Joe Simons is a Principal Scientist and Group Manager (Social & Behavioural Inference) in the Social & Cognitive Computing (SCC) Department at the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) and Lead of A*STAR’s Social Sciences & Technology Horizontal Technology Coordinating Office (SST HTCO). A social psychologist by training, he has extensive experience collaborating with computational scientists and leading interdisciplinary research teams. His work applies methodologies from the computational sciences – such as predictive modelling and language processing - to better address social-behavioural questions. His work has been featured in outlets including Communication Research, IEEE Pervasive Computing, and Media Psychology.
Dr. Hoi Shan Cheung
Assistant Professor Hoi Shan Cheung (PhD) from NTU - Dr Cheung began her research career in 2004 at the Singapore Children’s Society, a voluntary welfare organisation where she conducted research and advocacy on parenting and children’s development in Singapore. She obtained a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2014, and focused primarily on how parental sensitivity is related to children’s peer relationships in pre-school based on attachment theory. During her doctoral years, she was trained to conduct observations of caregiver sensitivity using several paradigms. She continued to develop her research in attachment theory and applying it to multiple social contexts, such as school bullying, as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at NUS and later a visiting scholar in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Purdue University. Her current research focuses the functional meaning of parenting practices in the Asian context, and how these may have an impact on children’s self-regulation and well-being. Dr. Cheung joined the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in 2023.
Dr. Hui Yu
Hui Yu (PhD) from Montfort University (UK) - Dr Yu is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at De Montfort University. She received her bachelor's degree in life sciences from Peking University, and master's degree in medical school from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Then she quitted biology and changed to psychology and obtained her PhD from National University of Singapore. Dr Yu is interested in the application of experimental methods and computational modelling to investigate the processes and mechanisms underlying bias and inequality, particularly within the realms of mental health and social psychology. Her body of work includes numerous publications exploring diverse human behaviours, such as discriminatory attitudes towards migrants and the hostile treatment of gender minoritised groups. Through her research, she aims to advance our understanding of individual differences and contribute to the enhancement of lifelong wellbeing among individuals from various backgrounds.