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
Professor Helen Zhou is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Sleep and Cognition and Director of the Centre for Translational MR Research, National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. 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. Professor Zhou’s research focuses on the network-based vulnerability hypothesis in disease.
As a Neuroimaging Studies Researcher, her lab studies the human neural bases of cognitive functions and the associated vulnerability patterns in ageing and neuropsychiatric disorders using multimodal neuroimaging methods, psychophysical techniques, and machine learning approaches.
Prior to joining NUS in 2011, Professor Helen 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. Professor Zhou received her Bachelor degree with a first class honour (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 (1998-2003) 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), and the Recognitive of Excellence from OpenGov (2024).
As a leading Neurological Disorders Researcher, Professor Zhou has served as a Council Member and a Program Committee member of the Organisation of Human Brain Mapping. She serves on the advisory board of Cell Reports Medicine and as an Editor of multiple journals including Elife, Human Brain Mapping, Imaging Neuroscience, and Communications Biology. Professor 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.
