Aging, Inclusion and Healthcare

This Cluster draws on the expertise in ageing research across all the four programmes within the School of Social Sciences including Economics, Psychology, Policy & Global Affairs, and Sociology to address critical ageing issues in Singapore and Greater Asia. The Cluster will foster an exciting and dynamic intellectual environment for interdisciplinary research, contributing to innovative ways in addressing the challenges posed and harnessing the opportunities presented by a rapidly ageing demographic across the region and around the world. The focus will be on multifaceted aspects of ageing from examining public policy and financing concerns, age friendly cities and supportive communities, to gaining deeper understanding of enhancing individual, familial, and social capacities across the later lifespan marked by health, illness, and mortality. The Cluster will promote collaborative research by exploring synergies for grant applications and publications. It will have an active seminar and workshop series as well as outreach programmes and social media presence to promote intellectual exchanges across different disciplines and stakeholder groups on ageing. The Cluster will also work closely with the Master of Sciences in Applied Gerontology programme to nurture interest, engagement, and participation from learners, researchers, and practitioners from all walks of life to work towards innovations and sustainable solutions that enhance and advance healthy, creative, and inclusive ageing.

Cluster Coordinator
Asst. Prof Luk Ching Yuen Sabrina (PPGA)	Sabrina’s research areas include healthy ageing, health financing reforms, e-government and smart cities, crisis leadership and management, and public policy analysis. Sabrina has published five monographs. Her recent publications include Ageing, Long-term Care Insurance and Healthcare Finance in Asia (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge) and Singapore after Lee Kuan Yew (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge).
Asst. Prof Yu Junhong (Psychology)	Junhong’s research interests include population neuroscience (i.e. lifespan-related changes in the brain, socio-economic factors, big neuroimaging data), cognitive aging (i.e. mild cognitive impairment, dementia, superior-cognitive aging, neural correlates of cognitive functions, predictors of subsequent cognitive decline), brain-based behavioural predictions (i.e. multimodal neuroimaging features, connectome-based prediction models) and cognitive enhancements (i.e. low cost interventions targeted at the masses (e.g., nutrition based), non-invasive brain stimulation, neurofeedback).
Cluster Members
Asst. Prof Akshar Saxena (Economics)	Akshar is a health economist who works on the interaction between individual’s health and labour decisions, and government’s policies on sin-taxes, healthcare financing, and social security.
Prof Chen Shen-Hsing Annabel (Psychology)	Annabel is President's Chair Professor in Psychology and the Director for Centre for Research & Development in learning. She is a Clinical Neuropsychologist and conducts research examining ways to optimise neurocognition based on neuropsychology principles and employing neuroimaging techniques. Her current research interests include: • Neurophysiological changes in the aging brain for learning in - Language, memory and executive control networks - Neuromodulation to optimise and/or enhance brain functions through • Cognitive training (including motor control training) • Non-invasive Brain Stimulation (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS), Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS)) • Contribution of the cerebellum to higher cognitive functions in learning - Working memory, emotion and motivation, and music in healthy and atypical groups (ASD, Dyslexia, ADHD) - Developing interventions using cognitive training and brain-computer interface (BCI)
Asst. Prof Kim Soojin (PPGA)	Soojin's research interests include policy effectiveness, citizen satisfaction/participation, public-private partnerships, and public budgeting and financial management. She has gained the research experience as a public administration (PA) scholar examining diverse (1) institutional, (2) managerial, and (3) contextual factors embedded in public policy and management. She has continued this line by pursuing evidence-seeking exploratory work within the broad area of strategic public management, using case studies, large scale empirical data analysis, survey experiments, and mixed methods such as self-administered surveys and interviews.
Asst. Prof Minne Chen (Sociology)	Minne is a sociologist whose research primarily focuses on how gender and family dynamics influence wellbeing trajectories and contribute to social stratification. Additionally, she engages in evaluating the design, feasibility, effectiveness, and implementation of health interventions using quasi-experimental and experimental designs, including cluster randomised controlled trials.
Asst. Prof Paul Victor Patinadan (Psychology)	Paul Victor specialises in health research. He holds appointments as a Health Professions Educator with the National Healthcare Group, a Clinical Teacher at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, and is also an Association for Death Education and Counselling (ADEC) certified Thanatologist. As an interdisciplinary mixed-methods researcher, Paul Victor specialises in psychosocial interventions, positive psychology and wellbeing, implementation science, holistic education in care-ecosystems, and how the medical humanities are employed for humanistic pedagogy. He has worked on projects with a focus on grief and bereavement, community and critical health psychology, psychosociospiritual wellbeing for patients and their families, and evaluative research for health organisations.
Asst. Prof Shannon Ang (Sociology)	Shannon primarily uses quantitative methods to pursue research interests in life course sociology, focusing on the health and social lives of older adults. This includes the social support and social participation (including online participation) of older adults, and their implications for mental and physical health outcomes. He also examines population trends in areas such as social cohesion, union formation (e.g., marriage, cohabitation), and how ’linked lives’ (e.g., spouses) may affect each other.
Asst. Prof Tan Chin Hong (Psychology)	Chin Hong is an interdisciplinary cognitive neuroscientist whose research interest lies broadly in using neuroimaging techniques, genetics, and psychosocial factors to understand the earliest risk markers of neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive decline.
Asst. Prof Wang Wenjie (Economics)	Wenjie's research interests include Econometric Theory, Machine Learning, Policy Evaluation, and Behavioural Economics. Recently, he is working on research topics such as high-dimensional instrumental variables (IV) models with possibly weak instruments, cluster-robust bootstrap inference for IV quantile regressions, and spatial/network-dependence robust inference methods for high-dimensional models. He is also working on the empirical application of machine learning and network analysis to healthcare and environment issues.
Asst. Prof Wei Xing Toh (Psychology)	Wei Xing's research interests include understanding the determinants and consequences of self-regulatory processes, primarily executive functions and emotion regulation, as well as how these processes unfold over the life span.
Asst. Prof Yeow Hwee Chua (Economics)	Yeow Hwee is the Deputy Director of the Economic Growth Centre at NTU and the Assistant Honorary Secretary of the Economics Society of Singapore. His research interests lie in the intersection of macroeconomics and finance, with a focus on topics in household finance, sustainable finance, behavioural macroeconomics, and monetary economics.