Choon-Peng Chng: Plant Physiology First Author

Choon-Peng Chng, first author of “Chloroplast membrane lipid remodeling protects against dehydration by limiting membrane fusion and distortion”

Current Position: Post Doc in Prof. Changjin Huang’s research group at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore).

Education: Ph.D. in Computational Biology, The University of Tokyo; M.Eng. in Computational Engineering, National University of Singapore; B.Sc. in Physics and Computational Science, National University of Singapore.

Non-scientific interests: Jogging, taking photos, solving jigsaw puzzles, spending time with my two young daughters.

 Brief Bio: My background is in physical/computational sciences but I teach myself molecular and cell biology. After getting my M.Eng., I moved into the field of structural bioinformatics/computational biophysics by chance when I started working as a research associate at Singapore’s Bioinformatics Institute. I furthered my training in biomolecular modeling and simulation during my Ph.D. under Prof. Akio Kitao (now at Tokyo Institute of Technology). Upon graduation, I worked as a research scientist at government sponsored research institutes in Singapore studying membrane proteins involved in cell adhesion/migration in close collaboration with experimentalists. I joined Prof. Changjin Huang’s group at Nanyang Technological University in 2019, where experimental and computational techniques are used to identify underlying physical principles controlling mechanical properties of biological systems and soft biomaterials. Here I lead several projects in collaboration with plant biologists to gain mechanistic insights into the behavior of plant cell membranes modulated by environmental factors such as dehydration or by changes to lipid composition.