Biography
Xi Chen, Ph.D., is an associate professor of public health (health policy), of global health, of economics, and of Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University. He is a faculty fellow at the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), Yale Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Yale Center for Climate Change and Health, Yale Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale Institute for Network Science (YINS), and a faculty advisor of the Yale-China Association. He is a PEPPER Scholar at Yale Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center. He co-organizes Yale Population Studies Workshop. His research endeavors mainly involve:
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economics of cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), using both medical claims data and survey data to investigate how cognitive aging may affect decision-making and healthcare utilization, and ADRD care quality, costs and equity;
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pension, retirement, dementia-friendly community, and other aging-related policies and health of the aging population;
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impacts of environmental pollution and climate change on older adults;
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machine learning and causal inference in better understanding life course factors and healthy aging;
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the role of large language models (LLM) in health care and long-term care;
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trends of diversity, equity, and Inclusion in global ADRD clinical trials.
Professor Chen is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, fellow at the Global Labor Organization (GLO) and its Cluster Lead in Environment and Human Capital, Editor at the Journal of Population Economics, President of the China Health Policy and Management Society (CHPAMS) (2018-2020), and an Academic Committee member of the Global Lecture Series on Chinese Economy. He is an adjunct professor at Peking University and a Council Member at SJTU-Yale Joint Health Policy Center. He consults for the United Nations and the World Bank. He is an alumni affiliate of Cornell Institute on Health Economics, Health Behaviors & Disparities, Cornell Population Center, and Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences. He has served as a grant reviewer for the National Sciences Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the Research Council of Norway, Guest Editor at the Journal of Aging & Social Policy, guest editor at the Journal of Asian Economics, guest editor at Social Science & Medicine, a member of the editorial board at China CDC Weekly, and a reviewer for more than 30 peer-reviewed journals.
Professor Chen has been ranked the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists by Stanford University and Elsevier, and top 1.5% of economists worldwide by RePEc. His work has been recognized through numerous awards, including the Best China Paper from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) (2011), the George Warren Award (2012), the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award from the AAEA (2013), the MacMillan Faculty Research Award (2013, 2017), USDA-ERS (2008), James Tobin Summer Research Award (2014-2022), the Kempf Award (2017-2018), major research awards from the National Institute of Health (NIH), the U.S. PEPPER Center Scholar Award (2016), Emerging Scholar and Professional Organization Interdisciplinary Paper Award of the Gerontology Association of America (2019), the Best Abstract Award at the Academy Health Research Meetings (2020), YSPH Investigator Prize (2025). He is a Butler-Williams Scholar at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) (2019). His timely and rigorous economic evaluations on the COVID-19 pandemic won the Kuznets Prize (2021).
His research projects funded by public and private funding sources has resulted in 140+ peer-reviewed publications, such as PNAS, Nature Aging, LANCET, JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, PLoS Medicine, JAERE, JEEM, JoPE, EHP, SSM, JEoA, and AJAE. These studies have been widely covered 3,000+ times in popular media worldwide, such as BBC, CNN, CBS, the Wall Street Joiurnal, the New York Times, The Guardian, the Financial Times, The Economist, the Washington Post, the Macmillan Report, The Times of London, NPR, NBC News, Reuters, te Associated Press, Time magazine, Fortune, Slate, Forbes, Bloomberg, CNBC, Al Jazeera, World Economic Forum, Science Magazine, Nature, DW, ABC (Australia), ABC (USA), EuroNews, Foreign Policy, FOX News, New Scientist, The Hill, National Geography, Foreign Affairs, The LANCET, RT, Xinhua News Agency, Global Times, and People’s Daily, The Hill, CBC, Voice Of America, The Telegraph, AFP, Scientific American, SCMP, The Independent, Yahoo Finance, Vox, Barron’s, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, WIRED, VICE, The Atlantic, and the Scientist magazine. He is a commentator at BBC, CNN, EuroNews, CGTN. Chen has written opinion pieces for the New York Times. Chen has been invited by The National Committee on United States China Relations (NCUSCR) as a delegate of U.S.-China Healthcare Dialogue (Track II).
In the past 10 years, Professor Chen has supervised more than 40 postdoctoral fellows, Ph.D. students and Yale College students who have won a number of outstanding paper awards, such as Yale’s Best Economics Senior Essay (The Meltzer Prize), YSPH Best Dissertation Research Award, NIH’s Matilda White Riley Early Stage Investigator Honors, Best Ph.D. Paper (Australia Journal of Management), Best Poster Award (Population Association of America), and Best Poster Presentation Award (Yale Global Health Day). Two postdoctoral associates have been awarded NIH’s K99 Career Development Award. One junior faculty mentee has won the New Investigator Award of Alzheimer’s Association and the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center. Chen has taught quantitative methods in health economics and health services research, as well as U.S.-China Health Systems at Yale.
Chen obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Cornell University.