Dr Yin Hoon Chew BEng MEng PhD

Dr Yin Hoon Chew

School of Chemical Engineering
Assistant Professor in Healthcare Technologies

Contact details

Address
Healthcare Technologies Institute
Institute of Translational Medicine
Heritage Building (Old Queen Elizabeth Hospital)
Mindelsohn Way
Edgbaston, Birmingham
B15 2TH

Dr Yin Hoon Chew is an Assistant Professor at the Healthcare Technologies Institute and the School of Chemical Engineering. She develops computational models to understand and predict how living organisms respond to the environment given their genetic and epigenetic programmes.

Qualifications

  • PhD in Systems Biology, University of Edinburgh, 2013
  • MEng in Bioprocess Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 2007
  • BEng (Hons) in Chemical-Bioprocess Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 2005

Biography

Yin Hoon is a chemical and bioprocess engineer by training. Upon graduating from her bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Technology Malaysia, she worked as a research assistant and developed an interest in modelling biological systems. After a brief tenure as a lecturer, she moved to the UK to pursue a PhD in Systems Biology at the University of Edinburgh, where she developed a multiscale model of Arabidopsis that integrates circadian gene network, carbon metabolism, organ growth and plant development. She later moved to Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and prototyped a whole-cell computational model of human embryonic stem cells that incorporates large scale multi-omics, biochemical and physiological data. She returned to the UK and joined the University of Birmingham in 2021.

Yin Hoon is an interdisciplinary researcher who applies engineering principles, mathematical sciences and computational techniques to study complex biological systems. Her research integrates different formalisms, algorithms and data types using a modular approach to connect processes and scales in biology. The aim is to develop digital technologies for designing biological systems with desired traits, for application in personalised medicine and bioengineering. Her current research focuses on comprehensive whole-cell modelling of mammalian cells.

Postgraduate supervision

Dr Yin Hoon Chew combines mathematical and computational sciences to study complex biological systems, particularly living cells. Her work falls into the broader field of computational systems biology. The principal areas of her current research activity are:

  • Whole-cell modelling: developing comprehensive models of mammalian cells; experimental validation of model predictions
  • Modular modelling of biological systems: developing methods/software to support a modular approach to building models
  • Hybrid modelling: developing methods that integrate mechanistic modelling with data-driven modelling

Other activities

  • Member of The Society for Experimental Biology, 2012-present
  • Member of The International Society for Computational Biology, 2020-present

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Chew, YH & Spill, F 2024, 'Discretised Flux Balance Analysis for Reaction–Diffusion Simulation of Single-Cell Metabolism', Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, vol. 86, no. 4, 39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-024-01264-6

Chew, YH 2022, 'The Arabidopsis Framework Model version 2 predicts the organism-level effects of circadian clock gene mis-regulation', in silico Plants.

Goldberg, AP, Szigeti, B, Chew, YH, Sekar, JA, Roth, YD & Karr, JR 2018, 'Emerging whole-cell modeling principles and methods', Current Opinion in Biotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copbio.2017.12.013

Chew, YH, Seaton, DD & Millar, AJ 2017, 'Multi-scale modelling to synergise Plant Systems Biology and Crop Science', Field Crops Research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fcr.2016.02.012

Waltemath, D, Karr, JR, Bergmann, FT, Chelliah, V, Hucka, M, Krantz, M, Liebermeister, W, Mendes, P, Myers, CJ, Pir, P, Alaybeyoglu, B, Aranganathan, NK, Baghalian, K, Bittig, AT, Burke, PEP, Cantarelli, M, Chew, YH, Costa, RS, Cursons, J, Czauderna, T, Goldberg, AP, Gomez, HF, Hahn, J, Hameri, T, Gardiol, DFH, Kazakiewicz, D, Kiselev, I, Knight-Schrijver, V, Knupfer, C, Konig, M, Lee, D, Lloret-Villas, A, Mandrik, N, Medley, JK, Moreau, B, Naderi-Meshkin, H, Palaniappan, SK, Priego-Espinosa, D, Scharm, M, Sharma, M, Smallbone, K, Stanford, NJ, Song, J-H, Theile, T, Tokic, M, Tomar, N, Toure, V, Uhlendorf, J, Varusai, TM, Watanabe, LH, Wendland, F, Wolfien, M, Yurkovich, JT, Zhu, Y, Zardilis, A, Zhukova, A & Schreiber, F 2016, 'Toward Community Standards and Software for Whole-Cell Modeling', IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/TBME.2016.2560762

Chew, YH, Wenden, B, Flis, A, Mengin, V, Taylor, J, Davey, CL, Tindal, C, Thomas, H, Ougham, HJ, De Reffye, P, Stitt, M, Williams, M, Muetzelfeldt, R, Halliday, KJ & Millar, AJ 2015, 'Correction: Multiscale digital Arabidopsis predicts individual organ and whole-organism growth (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (2014) 111 (E4127-E4136))', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1506983112

Chew, YH, Smith, RW, Jones, HJ, Seaton, DD, Grima, R & Halliday, KJ 2014, 'Mathematical Models Light Up Plant Signaling', The Plant Cell. https://doi.org/10.1105/TPC.113.120006

Chew, YH, Wenden, B, Flis, A, Mengin, V, Taylor, J, Davey, CL, Tindal, C, Thomas, H, Ougham, HJ, De Reffye, P, Stitt, M, Williams, M, Muetzelfeldt, R, Halliday, KJ & Millar, AJ 2014, 'Multiscale digital Arabidopsis predicts individual organ and whole-organism growth', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1410238111

Chew, YH, Wilczek, AM, Williams, M, Welch, SM, Schmitt, J & Halliday, KJ 2012, 'An augmented Arabidopsis phenology model reveals seasonal temperature control of flowering time', New Phytologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2012.04069.x

Chew, YH & Halliday, KJ 2011, 'A stress-free walk from Arabidopsis to crops', Current Opinion in Biotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copbio.2010.11.011

Chew, YH, Shia, YL, Lee, CT, Majid, FAA, Chua, LS, Sarmidi, MR & Aziz, RA 2009, 'Modeling of glucose regulation and insulin-signaling pathways', Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mce.2009.01.018

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Chew, YH & Marucci, L 2024, Mechanistic Model-Driven Biodesign in Mammalian Synthetic Biology. in F Ceroni & K Polizzi (eds), Mammalian Synthetic Systems. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol. 2774, Humana Press, New York, pp. 71–84. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3718-0_6

Conference contribution

Goldberg, AP, Chew, YH & Karr, JR 2016, Toward scalable whole-cell modeling of human cells. in SIGSIM-PADS 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 Annual ACM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation. https://doi.org/10.1145/2901378.2901402

Other contribution

Chew, YH, Seaton, DD, Mengin, V, Flis, A, Mugford, ST, Smith, AM, Stitt, M & Millar, AJ 2017, Linking circadian time to growth rate quantitatively via carbon metabolism.. https://doi.org/10.1101/105437

Review article

Chew, YH & Karr, JR 2021, 'Centralizing data to unlock whole-cell models', Current Opinion in Systems Biology, vol. 27, 100353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coisb.2021.06.004

View all publications in research portal