Chee, Michael

Biography

Dr. Michael Chee is a Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School and Principal Investigator of the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. He is a member of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program at Duke-NUS Medical School. Dr. Chee earned a MBBS from the National University of Singapore and trained in internal medicine and neurology. He was a Fellow in Epilepsy and Clinical Neurophysiology at The Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, USA and after some years in clinical practice, undertook a research fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital NMR Center in Boston. His early research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) involved several seminal contributions in the study of the bilingual brain, specifically the study of English-Chinese bilinguals. Intrigued by the effects of numerous trans-meridian flights he had taken, he began studying cognition in the setting of short-term total sleep deprivation - a research area that has been his principal focus since 2003. The goals of this research are to uncover the cognitive weak links contributing to performance decline in the sleep-deprived state and to examine the basis for inter-individual variation in tolerance of sleep deprivation. Two areas of his current interest are the effects of sleep deprivation on visual attention and processing capacity, and on decision-making.

Research Interest

Sleep deprivation and healthy cognitive aging.