Appointment(s)
Feb 2020 – Present, Director, Centre for Sleep and Cognition, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore
Oct 2022 – Present, Senior Advisor, Centre for Translational MR Research, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore
January 2022 – Present, Professor (joint appointment), Human Potential Translation Research Programme, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore
Feb 2020 – Present, Professor (joint appointment), Programme in Neuroscience & Behavioural Disorders, Duke-NUS Medical School
Degree(s)
MBBS, National University of Singapore
FRCP (Edin)
FAMS (Neurology)
Diplomate, American Board of Clinical Neurophysiology
Biography
Professor Michael Chee, MBBS, FRCP(Edin) is the Director of Centre for Sleep and Cognition at the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. He is a pioneer clinician-scientist in Singapore who has won the National Outstanding Clinician-Scientist Award (2009) and is a three-time award winner of the National Medical Research Council’s top tier Clinician-Scientist STaR award (2007, 2013, 2019). He is an inaugural Fellow of the Organisation for Human Brain Mapping.
As an esteemed Sleep Researcher, Professor Michael Chee’s work on sleep over the last 20 years has focused on characterising and alleviating the negative impact of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance, wellbeing and health using innovative cognitive tests as well as a wide range of instrumentation including EEG, MRI, wearable devices, and ecological momentary assessments. His team ran 5 editions of the adolescent ‘Need for Sleep Studies’ – a 2-week sleep camp investigating the effects of different doses of sleep on vigilance, memory and mood.
Renowned as a leading Sleep Researcher, he has led work on non-invasive stimulation technologies to enhance sleep, a series of intervention studies involving sleep education and starting school later to help adolescents sleep longer, developed smartphone apps to assess time use and to probe sleep and daytime wellbeing, as well as multiple papers investigating the neural mechanisms of sleep loss as well as the benefit of naps. His 200+ publications include contributions to Ann Rev Psychol, PNAS, Neuron, J Neuroscience, Am J Psychiatry, Neurology, Sleep and NeuroImage. His research has attracted over $50 million in funding as Principal Investigator.
In the sleep field, he has served as Vice President (2013-2014) and President (2016-2018) of the Singapore Sleep Society, given plenary or keynote talks at top conferences such as World Sleep, Organization for Human Brain Mapping and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, consulted for AIA and presently sits on the editorial boards of Sleep, Imaging Neuroscience and Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.
He has also written numerous commentaries on sleep and public health and has appeared on television, internet, and international print media in relation to his advocacy work for sleep, which has been cited by the Times, Guardian, Economist, and other influential lay press publications. He has also trained over 80 research staff including 4 Associate Professors, 7 Assistant Professors, numerous research fellows as well as a few medical doctors, clinical psychologists, and founders of two tech start-ups.