Xi Chen, PhD

Xi Chen, Ph.D., is an assistant 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), the Yale Climate Change and Health Initiative, the 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 and co-leads academic events for young scholars at Yale Program on Aging and Yale Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center. His areas of interest involve Health, Labor, Development Economics, and Applied Econometrics and Quantitative Methods. His research focuses on public policies related to health over the life cycle, population aging, climate change and health, and quality of life.

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 in Developing Countries, President of the China Health Policy and Management Society (CHPAMS), Butler-Williams Scholar at National Institute on Aging (NIA), a 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 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 consulted for the United Nations. 

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), the Butler-Williams Scholar (2019), and the U.S. PEPPER Center Scholar Award (2016).

His research projects funded by public and private funding sources has resulted in 60+ peer-reviewed publications, such as PNAS, LANCET, PLoS Medicine, LANCET Public Health, JEEM, EHP, SSM, JoEA, and AJAE. These studies have been widely covered in 400+ popular media worldwide, such as BBC, CNN, 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, National Geography, Foreign Affairs, Xinhua News Agency, and People's Daily. He is a commentator at China Central Television. 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 five years, Professor Chen has supervised more than 20 postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and Yale College students who have won a number of outstanding paper awards.

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