Faculty Profile
ANG Keng Cheng, an Associate Professor of Mathematics Education academic group of NIE, received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from The University of Adelaide (Australia). In his doctoral thesis, he developed a number of mathematical models of blood flow through partially blocked arteries using computational techniques, and proposed better means of understanding the progression of arterial diseases. Since then, he has worked on and published papers related to mathematical modelling in various medical and biological settings, as well as computational methods in partial differential equations. More recently, his research interests have also included the teaching and learning of mathematical modelling in schools
Berinderjeet KAUR is a full professor of Mathematics Education at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research interests include cognition and affect related to mathematical problem solving; classroom practices of expert and novice teachers; teacher learning and development of expertise viz-a-viz empirical studies of professional development programmes, professional learning communities and communities of practice. She is also interested in secondary analysis of data from comparative studies in mathematics education such as PISA and TIMSS.
CHENG Lu Pien, received her PhD in Mathematics Education from the University of Georgia (U.S.) in 2006. She is an assistant professor with the Mathematics and Mathematics Education Academic Group at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She specializes in mathematics education courses for primary school teachers. Her research interests include the professional development of primary school mathematics teachers, tools and processes in mathematics education programmes for pre-service teachers. Her research interests also include children's thinking in the mathematics classrooms.
Choy Ban Heng, a recipient of the NIE Overseas Graduate Scholarship in 2011, is currently an Assistant Professor in Mathematics Education at the National Institute of Education. Prior to joining NIE, He taught secondary school students Mathematics for more than ten years, and held the position of Head of Department (Special Projects) before he joined the CPDD in MOE as a Curriculum Policy Officer. He holds a PhD in Mathematics Education from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Specialising in mathematics teacher noticing, he developed a theory for describing and analysing what mathematics teachers see, and how they think, when they make productive instructional decisions that enhance students’ mathematical reasoning. Ban Heng was awarded the Early Career Award during the 2013 MERGA Conference in Melbourne for his excellence in writing and presenting a piece of mathematics education research.
Dawn NG is a senior lecturer in the Mathematics and Mathematics Education Academic Group at the National Institute of Education. She is involved in teacher professional development at both primary and secondary levels. Her research interests include the use of contextualised tasks in the teaching and learning of mathematics, assessment modes in mathematics and fostering students’ mathematical thinking and metacognition. She has shared her research findings in conferences, workshops and journals. She has reviewed articles for several journals and conference proceedings. She is also a member of the International Community of Teachers of Mathematical Modelling and Applications as well as the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia.
DONG Fengming received his Ph.D. in mathematics from National University of Singapore in 1997. He is now an associate professor at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. His research interests are in graph theory and matroid theory, especially in the study of the relationship between structures and polynomials of graphs and matroids. He has published three books and more than 50 research papers, including papers solving some open conjectures (one is called the shameful conjecture on chromatic polynomials), in reputed journals
HO Weng Kin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Birmingham (UK) in 2006. His doctoral thesis proposed an operational domain theory for sequential functional programming languages. He specializes in programming language semantics and is dedicated to the study of hybrid semantics and their applications in computing. Notably, he solved the open problem that questions the existence of a purely operationally-based proof for the well-known minimal invariance theorem of (nested) recursive types in Fixed Point Calculus. His research interests also include domain theory, exact real arithmetic, category theory, algebra, real analysis and applications of topology in computation theory.
Joseph YEO Boon Wooi holds a PhD in Mathematics Education and a PGDE (Distinction) from National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and a BSc (First Class Honours) from University of Canterbury, New Zealand. His research interests include the use of guided-discovery approach, mathematical investigation, problem-based learning, and ICT (such as Geometer's Sketchpad, GeoGebra and LiveMath) in the teaching and learning of mathematics; statistics education; innovations in teaching, including the use of mathematical and logical games, puzzles, comics, real-life examples and applications, video clips, songs, story-telling, magic tricks, and enrichments to arouse student’s interest in mathematics; and the use of alternative assessment (such as problems in real-world contexts, open-ended problems, journal writing, problem posing and performance tasks) in assessing student learning.
Joseph YEO Kai Kow is a faculty member in the Mathematics and Mathematics Education Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. His research interests include mathematical problem solving in the primary and secondary levels, mathematics pedagogical content knowledge of teachers, mathematics teaching in primary schools and mathematics anxiety.
LEE Ngan Hoe is an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Education. He holds a BSc (First Class Honours in Pure Mathematics) from Monash University, Australia, a Dip Ed (Distinction) from Institute of Education, Singapore, a MScEd (Curriculum and Instruction – Mathematics Education) from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, USA, and a PhD in Education from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His publication and research interests include the teaching and learning of mathematics at primary and secondary levels, covering areas such as mathematics curriculum development, metacognition and mathematical problem solving / modelling, technology and mathematics education, and textbooks and mathematics education.
LEONG Yew Hoong obtained his PhD in Mathematics Education from the University of Melbourne. He is interested in mathematics education research that ‘works’ in classrooms, and other related fields such as teacher education, classroom research, problem solving. The research in these areas is published in a number of international journals.
NG Wee Leng holds a Master of Science degree, a Master of Education degree and a PhD degree in mathematics. His main area of expertise is the use of information and communications technology, including graphing calculators and computer algebra systems, in teaching and learning mathematics and he was the principal investigator of the funded research project Teaching and Learning Calculus with the TI-Nspire. His research interests also include the role of ancient Chinese mathematics in the mathematics curriculum and nonabsolute integrals on metric spaces.
Paul M.E. SHUTLER holds a BA from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. His research interests include computer modelling of discrete systems in statistical physics and combinatorial optimisation; analysis of hardware dependence in computer algorithms; design of coded aperture masks, decoding methods, signal to noise ratios.
TAY Eng Guan teaches Mathematics and Mathematics Education at the NIE in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests are also in both areas and include Graph Theory (directed graphs in particular, and some work with Dong Fengming in graph polynomials), mathematical problem solving and mathematical curriculum development. He is interested in realising good mathematics, problem solving skills and thinking habits in the school mathematics curriculum.
TEO Kok Ming received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 1994. His doctoral thesis studied the homological properties of certain class of non-commutative Noetherian rings and of Sklyanin algebras. He has also done research in wavelet theory, focusing particularly in periodic wavelets, and his publications are mainly in this area. He is currently interested in the teaching and learning of undergraduate mathematics; in particular, on misconceptions and learning difficulties of abstract mathematical concepts in calculus, linear algebra and abstract algebra, and in exploring ways to address these issues.
TOH Pee Choon received his PhD from the National University of Singapore in 2007. He is currently an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. His main research interest is Number Theory, specifically the theory of partitions, modular forms and elliptic functions. He is also interested in problem solving, the teaching of mathematics at the undergraduate level, as well as the use of technology in teaching.
TOH Tin Lam is an Associate Professor in the Mathematics & Mathematics Education Academic Group in the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. He is involved in research in both mathematics and mathematics education. His research interest in Mathematics involves using the generalized Riemann (or Henstock) approach in developing theory on stochastic integration and stochastic differential equations. His research interest in mathematics education includes teaching problem solving in school mathematics classrooms.
ZHAO Dongsheng received his BSc and MSc from Shaanxi Normal University and PhD from University of Cambridge. His research interests have been in order structures (domains and special posets and lattices), topology (general topology and intrinsic topologies on partially ordered sets) and real analysis (generalized Riemann integrals, Baire class one functions). Currently he is particularly interested in the maximal point spaces of general posets and the structure of Scott closed set lattices.
ZHU Tianming received her Ph.D. in Statistics from National University of Singapore. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. Her main research interest is the hypothesis testing problem, specifically for high-dimensional data and for multivariate functional data. She also has rich experience in using deep learning algorithms to solve real-world problems such as synthesizing tabular data using Generative Adversarial Networks and Variational Autoencoder, anomaly detection using Autoencoder and brain MRI classification problem.