/enri-thumbnails/careeropportunities1f0caf1c-a12d-479c-be7c-3c04e085c617.tmb-mega-menu.jpg?sfvrsn=d7261e3b_1)
/cradle-thumbnails/research-capabilities1516d0ba63aa44f0b4ee77a8c05263b2.tmb-mega-menu.jpg?sfvrsn=1bc94f8_1)
7e6fdc03-9018-4d08-9a98-8a21acbc37ba.tmb-mega-menu.jpg?sfvrsn=7deaf618_1)
About Us
The Centre for Healthy and Sustainable Cities (CHESS) is a research centre under the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information's - Communication and Informatics Research Laboratory Asia (COOL ASIA). With a seed funding of S$1.5M from NTU, it conducts research activities to develop healthy and sustainable cities using traditional and novel communication and information theories. CHESS takes new research approaches by conducting cutting-edge social and computational research methods to solve complex problems faced by modern cities.
Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the centre works with other NTU research entities and international partners to obtain research outcomes that have an impact to individuals, societies and cities-at large. The centre aims to nurture future researchers that will take on the challenges in developing healthy and sustainable cities.
Directors' Message
Welcome to the Centre for Healthy and Sustainable Cities (CHESS). CHESS is an interdisciplinary research centre devoted to projects at the convergence of technology, communication and information on health, risk and environmental issues from human-centred perspectives in the Asian context.
Situated at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI), Nanyang Technological University, CHESS aims to advance knowledge, and foster innovation in order to address critical scientific, technological, and innovation challenges and gaps in computational social science – an emerging field that leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data at a scale that may reveal patterns of individual and group behaviors, facing issues relating to health, risk and environment.
CHESS aims to contribute scientific knowledge from the interaction of technology (new, emerging and future) and human behaviors in the context of health, risk and sustainability drawing upon theories and concepts from communication and information science. By leveraging the power of digital technologies and communication strategies, the vision of CHESS also focuses on ‘health and wellbeing for all at all ages’, in which citizen-centricity, quality of care, better access, universal health coverage, and inclusiveness are some of the key principles studied.
The research centre currently has full-time research staff each having different skillsets ranging from communication research, big data, mobile & web development, social media to public health. CHESS also has local and international interns who work on various research projects. Aside from academic partners, CHESS is also actively engaging industry partners to attain her goals.
As an interdisciplinary research centre, CHESS will lead research, innovations and development to create the healthy and sustainable cities of the future.
Professor Theng Yin Leng and Professor May O. Lwin
Co-Directors
Centre for Healthy and Sustainable Cities (CHESS)