Xi Chen, PhD

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 Institute 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, the 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. His research endeavors focus on economics and public policies on population aging, and global health systems. Currently, his main research projects involve: 1) 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; 2) Pension, retirement policies and health of the aging population; 3) The impact of environmental pollution and climate change on older adults; 4) life course factors and healthy aging.

Professor Chen is a 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, President (2018-2020) of the China Health Policy and Management Society (CHPAMS), Butler-Williams Scholar at National Institute on Aging (NIA), grant reviewer of the National Sciences Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the Research Council of Norway, and a reviewer of more than 30 peer-reviewed journals. He consults for the United Nations. He is an alumni affiliate of Cornell Institute on Health Economics, Health Behaviors & Disparities, Cornell Population Center, and Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences.

Chen's 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), the Kempf Award (2017-2018), awards from the National Institute of Health (NIH), and the U.S. PEPPER Center Scholar Award (2016). He is a Butler-Williams Scholar (2019). His timely and rigorous economic evaluations on the COVID-19 pandemic won the Kuznets Prize (2020).

His research projects funded by public and private funding sources has resulted in 75+ peer-reviewed publications, such as PNAS, LANCET, PLoS Medicine, LANCET Public Health, JEEM, JoPE, EHP, SSM, JoEA, and AJAE. These studies have been widely covered 1,000+ times in popular media worldwide, such as BBC, CNN, CBS, WSJ, NYT, The Guardian, Financial Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Macmillan Report, The Times of London, NPR, Time Magazine, Fortune, Slate, Forbes, Bloomberg, CNBC, Al Jazeera, World Economic Forum, Science Magazine, ABC, EuroNews, Foreign Policy, FOX News, Foreign Affairs, New Scientist, National Geography, Foreign Affairs, RT, Xinhua News Agency, Global Times, and People's Daily. He is a commentator at BBC, CNN, EuroNews, CCTV, CGTN. 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 six years, Professor Chen has supervised more than 30 postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and Yale College students who have won a number of outstanding paper awards.

Over the past eight years, Professor Chen has taught quantitative methods in health economics and health services research, as well as U.S.-China Health Systems at Yale.

Professor Chen obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Cornell University.