Robert Loh Associate Professorship in Ophthalmology

Associate Professor Chia received her ophthalmology training with the Sydney Eye Hospital, and underwent a paediatric ophthalmology fellowship at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, London. She completed a Master Business Administration (MBA) with the University of Southern Queensland, and her PhD with the National University of Singapore.

Associate Professor Chia is currently the Head of the Paediatric Ophthalmology Department and Clinical Director of the Myopia Service at SNEC. She is actively involved in clinical service and was recently presented with the Distinguished Senior Clinician Award in 2023. She has also been a member of the SNEC Training and Education team, joining the core-faculty of the then-new Ophthalmology Residency Programme in 2011, and serving as Programme Director from 2014 to 2017. She continues to be actively involved in training and educating clinicians, mentoring young residents and researchers, and being involved in an online local education programme. In 2022, she received the Distinguished Mentor Award at the SingHealth Excellence Awards Ceremony.

As a well-known researcher and clinician in a rapidly changing myopia field, she continues to be involved in webinars and conferences, sharing her experiences with budding myopia clinician-scientists worldwide. Together with the myopia team in Singapore, she is developing an online education certificate programme for eye-care practitioners. The team is also working with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and industry partners to make Singapore a regional hub for myopia education.

To date, Associate Professor Chia has published >70 refereed articles, and a total of 6 books and book chapters. She presents regularly at conferences and scientific meetings. Her research interests include strabismus, amblyopia, retinopathy of prematurity, medical and non-medical control of myopia. Associate Professor Chia is a Senior Clinical Investigator and co-heads the Myopia Research Group at the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI). She is currently a Principal Investigator (PI) of several myopia interventional and cohort studies. She is best known for her myopia research and her work on the Atropine Treatment of Myopia (ATOM1 and ATOM2) studies, which have markedly change how myopia is treated around the world. As part of the myopia team at SERI, she was awarded the President Science & Technology Award in 2019 for their three decades of dedicated research in the field of myopia.

She continues to grow her portfolio with several successful grant applications and completion of research projects over the last 3 years. She has been the Lead PI and a Theme PI of the IAF grant with Johnson and Johnson (total grant for the J&J-SERI Joint Lab >$20 million) as well as the PI of a recently awarded NMRC Clinical Trials Grant ($1.5 million). Her work has contributed to the new knowledge in the paediatric and myopic fields and she continues to publish actively in this field.