Michael Chee Wei Liang FRCP, MBBS

Professor Michael Chee Wei Liang is Director, Centre for Sleep and Cognition, NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. Before joining NUS Medicine, Mike was a Professor in the Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Programme at Duke-NUS in 2006. He was the Director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and Visiting Consultant at Singapore General Hospital since 2014.

He received an MBBS from NUS in 1983 and underwent specialist training in internal medicine and neurology. During a Fellowship in Epilepsy and Clinical Neurophysiology at The Cleveland Clinic Foundation from 1990 to 1992, he developed an interest in MRI that was furthered at the Massachusetts General Hospital NMR Centre. On returning to Singapore, he worked on the functional anatomy of the bilingual brain before switching focus to the neurobehavioral and imaging associates of sleep deprivation and combining this with a second interest in cognitive ageing.

Mike’s present research seeks to reduce the impact of degraded or restricted sleep on cognitive performance, well-being and health span. He will use objective measures of sleep, cognition, mood as well as physiological markers to tailor sleep-wake schedules for different age groups and individuals in a principled manner. His research has been well cited in scholarly journals, but also notable is his advocacy for science and its relevance to the common man. His work has been mentioned in leading international media such as Time Magazine, the Economist, and BBC. He has appeared in several locally produced scientific documentaries and has written commentaries on topics on health, science and the importance of sleep.

Mike was the inaugural recipient of the BMRC-NMRC Senior Clinician Investigator (2005) and NMRC Singapore Translational Research Investigator (STaR) Awards (2008; renewed in 2013 and 2020). In 2009, he received the National Outstanding Clinician-Scientist Award. In 2020, he will be an inaugural Fellow of the Organization of Human Brain Mapping.