How do you take stock of a person's health? If it were up to Dr Christine Cheung, 31, she would check the blood vessels.

She is a vascular biologist who can tell a lot from the health of the vessels that carry blood through the body's tissues and organs.

She has made it her mission to understand the intricate network and extract information that could help to predict the risk of illnesses such as stroke and vascular dementia.

"I believe the crux of many health conditions lies in the blood vessels," she said, citing stroke and vascular dementia patients whose blood vessels are damaged before brain cell deficits happen.

"Research shows it could be something that precedes neuron damage," she noted.

At the Agency for Science, Technology and Research's (A*Star) Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, she leads a team of four which is researching ways to predict the risk of developing such diseases.

It is also working towards creating diagnostic tools for early intervention, and eventually hope to pioneer preventive therapies.

In her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, she invented a way to create organ-specific blood vessels from stem cells.

For this, she won the Young Investigator Prize from the British Society for Cardiovascular Research.

On her return to A*Star in 2012, the team built on her research to develop a method to convert human stem cells into blood vessel cells that mimic those found in the brain.

Now the team uses that to make brain-specific blood vessel cells of specific individuals to study them more closely.

Thescientists hope these studies would help them understand what makes these people genetically predisposed to vascular diseases.

The team is also trying to identify bio-signatures - such as certain proteins and circulating DNA in the blood - which show the health status of blood vessels.

"The big question is how these bio-markers alter the person's underlying biology. We want to know what it means for blood vessel health, whether it is causal or a consequence of the disease," she said.

The A*Star scholar said the aim is really to be able to restore blood vessel health before diseases develop.

While research can be tiring, she is motivated when she thinks about making a difference to stroke survivors and people with dementia, who live out the last stages of their lives in a state of confusion.

The underlying causes for such diseases are still not well understood and managed.

"Unless more scientific progress is achieved by SG100, our healthcare burden on stroke and dementia may supersede spending on any other disease condition," she added.

It is not always smooth sailing in the laboratory but every experiment, whether it yields the desired result or not, is a step forward, she said. To her, it is the "quest for answers" that she finds most satisfying.

But when work stress boils over, she relaxes by singing in a band that includes four other scientists.

"We mostly play pop songs for friends and family but haven't made a public debut," she said.

She also seeks comfort in her husband of seven months, a civil servant and engineer by training - who she met while doing her PhD in cardiovascular and stem cell medicine at Cambridge. This was after obtaining a Bachelor of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering from Imperial College London.

"He understands my work and I guess because he is in a different field, he sees things from a different perspective," she said.

"Sometimes I find his advice can add new dimensions to my work."