Professor Dr. Cheah Fook Choe is currently on sabbatical and a visiting academic to the NPEU, University of Oxford. He is Professor of Paediatrics and senior consultant neonatologist at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) Medical Centre, Kuala Lumpur. Prof. Cheah completed speciality training in general paediatrics and was awarded Masters in Medicine (Paeds) by UKM in 1997. He went on to train in neonatology as a subspecialty in 1997 in the Mater Mothers’ Hospital in Brisbane, Australia and subsequently in the Maternity Hospital Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. From 2000 to 2003, he was the Neonatal Fellow in the Christchurch Women’s Hospital, New Zealand, completing advanced neonatal paediatrics training and PhD studies under the mentorship of Professors Brian Darlow and Christine Winterbourn during that period. He continued with a postdoctoral research career as a visiting scientist working with Professors Alan Jobe and Suhas Kallapur in pulmonary and perinatal biology at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, USA between 2006 and 2008.
Prof. Cheah has deep interest and vast experiences in both clinical and translational research projects, involving in international multi-centre collaborative trials that include Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. His major research interests are in preterm lung diseases, stabilisation and resuscitation of newborn infants, intrauterine infections and fetal inflammation, G6PD deficiency and neonatal nutrition. In 2011, Prof. Cheah received the Best Research Award at the Asian Society for Pediatric Research joint meeting with the Pediatric Academic Societies at Denver, USA for his work on the role of GM-CSF and macrophage recruitment in the lung during the perinatal period. He has written and edited several books and book chapters such as “Lung Disease of the Preterm Infant and Effects of Intrauterine Infection”, “Feeding the Preterm Infant – a Practical Handbook” and “Nutritional Care of Preterm Infants – Scientific Basis and Practical Guidelines, 2nd Edition”. He sits on various high-impact journal editorial boards such as “Neonatology” and “Frontiers in Pediatrics (Neonatology section)”.