Advancing Research with Impact: CoHASS Projects Awarded MOE AcRF Tier 2 Grants
Two CoHASS research projects have been awarded the prestigious MOE Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 2 grant. The grant support large-scale, high-impact research, reflecting strong confidence in both the scholarly merit and societal relevance of these projects.
The awarded works exemplify CoHASS’s interdisciplinary strengths, addressing critical issues spanning mental well-being and healthy aging through innovative, data-driven approaches.
We warmly congratulate both Associate Prof Wang Wenjie and Assistant Prof Luo Lizhu on their achievements. More details on their work can be found below.
Associate Professor Wang Wenjie
Associate Professor Wang Wenjie was awarded the grant for research that revolves around precision, prediction, and equity, with a focus on machine learning (ML)-driven innovations for healthy aging.
Policymakers have introduced various policies to address the challenges posed by a rapidly aging society. However, a comprehensive evaluation of the impact of these policies may be difficult due to substantial health-related heterogeneity in the population. Questions such as how health and mortality evolve during middle and old age, how unequal their evolution is among the population, and how to model such health dynamics remain largely unanswered in the literature.
Assoc Prof Wang’s research programme, conducted jointly with Prof Nattavudh (Nick) Powdthavee and Asst Prof Akshar Saxena of SSS Economics, aims to deliver significant contributions to both empirical health analysis and methodological development in this way:
- Through ML-based clustering and trajectory analysis, the work will generate comparative insights into population health dynamics across different countries such as Japan, China, and Singapore.
- It will particularly address the issues of weak and invalid instrumental variables (IVs) constructed from genetic markers. The researchers propose an innovative statistical procedure that remains robust to these issues.
- Their development of ML-powered Digital Twins for disease management will offer a new framework for personalized medicine.
The researchers will use large language models (LLMs) to analyse curated health texts, including clinical guidelines, research articles, and government reports from Singapore, Japan, China, and ASEAN member states. By converting this unstructured knowledge into structured variables, LLMs will enhance their longitudinal datasets, improve predictions of health state transitions, and facilitate the transfer of insights to countries with limited survey data.
For Singapore, which faces the dual challenges of an aging population and increasing healthcare demands, such comparative health analytics will offer a scientific basis for tailoring preventive strategies, allocating healthcare resources more efficiently, and designing population-specific interventions.
Collectively, they hope their findings will benefit a diverse range of stakeholders, including health policymakers, clinicians, and academic researchers, and will offer tangible tools and insights to guide the development of more effective, equitable, and data-driven healthcare systems.
Assistant Professor Luo Lizhu
Asst Prof Luo Lizhu has been awarded the prestigious Ministry of Education (MOE) Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 2 grant for her interdisciplinary project, “Recalling Emotions: a WINdow into adolescent Depressive symptoms (REWIND)”. This project explores how adolescents recall personal life events—known as autobiographical memory—and how these memories relate to early signs of depressive symptoms.
Adolescence marks the primary onset of major depression globally and in Singapore, yet many more youths experience subthreshold symptoms that often go unnoticed and increase later risk. Leveraging NTU’s interdisciplinary environment, Asst Prof Luo leads the Youth Affective Neuroscience Lab, where she integrates insights across fields to investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms of depressive symptoms in non-clinical youth. By identifying objective markers of early emotional and cognitive patterns—without emphasizing clinical labels—the lab aims to foster self-understanding and support adolescent well-being, while developing accessible, scalable, and stigma-free tools to help young people manage their mental health before symptoms escalate.
This newly funded project represents a key step toward this vision. By integrating psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and engineering, the REWIND project uses emotional autobiographical memory as a natural and less biased window into adolescents’ experiences, capturing rich emotional and cognitive information. These insights will support early understanding and inform practical strategies to promote mental well-being in Singapore and beyond.
This grant serves as both recognition and motivation, empowering the lab to bridge scientific discovery with meaningful, real-world support for adolescent emotional development.
