Appointment(s)
Associate Professor, Centre for Sleep and Cognition, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University Singapore
Director, Centre for Translational MR Research, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University Singapore
Affiliated with Human Potential TRP, Department of Medicine, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University Singapore and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Design and Engineering, National University Singapore
Degree(s)
Post-doctoral, University of California, San Francisco (2010)
PhD, Neuroimaging, Nanyang Technological University Singapore (2007)
Bachelor, Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University Singapore (2003)
Biography
Associate Professor Helen Zhou is Director of the Centre for Translational MR Research, National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and also with the Centre for Sleep and Cognition. She holds a joint appointment with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Design and Engineering, NUS, and is affiliated with the Department of Medicine and Healthy Longevity and Human Potential Translational Research Programmes at NUS Medicine and Duke-NUS Medical School.
A/Prof Zhou’s research focuses on selective brain network-based vulnerability in ageing and neuropsychiatric disorders, leveraging multimodal neuroimaging and machine learning approaches. She is widely recognized for her pioneering work on multimodal brain connectome, particularly in ageing and neuropsychiatric disorders. More recently, her team has made advances in brain foundation models using deep learning for non-invasive brain decoding and precision neurology and psychiatry.
Prior to joining NUS in 2011, A/Prof Zhou was an associate research scientist in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, New York University. She did a post-doctoral fellowship at the Memory and Aging Centre, Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, and in the Computational Biology Program at Singapore-MIT Alliance. A/Prof Zhou received her Bachelor degree with first class honours (accelerated) in 2003 and her Ph.D. in 2008 from School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is the recipient of an undergraduate scholarship from the Ministry of Education, Singapore and the nominee for the Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal and the Institution of Engineers Singapore Gold Medal, Singapore in 2004. Helen received the Excellent Service Award from Duke-NUS (2017), the Singhealth-Duke-NUS Academic Medicine Research Team Award (2019), Scholar Award (NeurIPS 2023), and the Recognitive of Excellence Award from OpenGov (2024).
A/Prof Zhou has served as a Council Member and a Program Committee member of the Organisation of Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) and International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM). She is an OHBM Fellow and on the advisory board of Cell Reports Medicine. She serves as an Editor of multiple journals including Elife, Human Brain Mapping, Imaging Neuroscience (NeuroImage), and Nature Communications Biology. A/Prof Zhou has received research support from National Medical Research Council, Biomedical Research Council, National Research Foundation, Ministry of Education, Singapore, the Royal Society, UK, and NIH, USA.
Variations in cortical functional gradients relate to dimensions of psychopathology in preschool children. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2023 (JIF: 13.113)
Nguyen TT, Qian X, Ng EKK, Ong MQW, Ngoh ZM, Yeo SSP, Lau JM, Tan AP, Broekman BFP, Law EC, Gluckman PD, Chong Y-S, Cortese S, Meaney MJ, Zhou JH.
Seeing Beyond the Brain: Conditional Diffusion Model with Sparse Masked Modeling for Vision Decoding, The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Vancouver, Canada, 2023. (NBC news/telegraph/CNA)
Chen Z, Qing J, Xiang T, Yue WL, Zhou JH.
Brain charts for the human lifespan. Nature. 2022; 604, 525–533. (JIF: 49.962)
Bethlehem RAI, Seidlitz J, White SR, ... Zhou JH, … Bullmore ET, Alexander-Bloch AF.
Higher handgrip strength is linked to higher salience ventral attention functional network segregation in older adults. Communications Biology, 2024;7(1), 214. (JIF: 6.548)
Chong JSX, Chua KY, Ng KK, Chong SW, Leong RL, Chee MW, Koh WP, Zhou JH.
Cinematic Mindscapes: High-quality Video Reconstruction from Brain Activity. Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS Oral), New Orleans, US, 2023. (Oral, scholar award)
Chen Z*, Qing J*, Zhou JH.
Associations of blood cardiovascular biomarkers with brain free water and its relationship to cognitive decline: A diffusion-MRI study. Neurology (JIF: 12.258).
Ji F, Chai YL, Liu S, … Lai MKP*, Zhou JH*.
(2022). Stage-dependent differential influence of metabolic and structural networks on memory across Alzheimer’s disease continuum. eLife, 11, e77745. (JIF 8.71)
Ng KP*, Qian X*, Ng KK, Ji F, Rosa-Neto P, Gauthier S, Kandiah N, Zhou JH.
Brain white matter extracellular free-water increases are related to reduced neurocognitive function in systemic lupus erythematosus. Rheumatology. 2021. (* Joint senior) (JIF: 7.58)
Qian X, Ji F, Ng, KK, Koh, AK, Loo BRY, Townsend MC, Pasternak O, Tay SH, Zhou JH*, Mak A*.
Distinct network topology in Alzheimer's disease and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. Alzheimers Res Ther. 2021;13(1):13. (JIF: 9.0)
Ng ASL*, Wang J*, Ng KK*, Chong JSX, Qian X, Lim JKW, Tan YJ, Yong ACW, Chander RJ, Hameed S, Ting SKS, Kandiah N, Zhou JH.
Cerebral microinfarcts affect brain structural network topology in cognitively impaired patients. Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism 2019. (JIF: 6.040)
Zhang L, Biessels GJ, Hilal S, Chong JSX, Liu S, Shim HY, Xu X, Chong EJY, Wong ZX, Loke YM, Venketasubramanian N, Tan BY, Chen CLH, Zhou JH.
