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. His areas of interest involve Health, Labor, Development Economics, and Applied Econometrics and Quantitative Methods. Specifically, his research focuses on the following areas: 1) fetal and early childhood development; 2) population aging and public policies; 3) climate change and health; 4) social network interactions; and 5) quality of life.

Recently, Chen has been working on six main projects: First, Chen collaborates with researchers from Peking University to better understand the long lasting impact of air pollution on happiness, mental health, cognitive functioning, productivity, and the economy; Second, Chen leads two National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to investigate how social pensions promote health and healthy aging; Third, Chen works with Yale PEPPER Center and Yale Program on Aging to link the two ends of life course to better understand how early childhood circumstances determine health disparities in old age; Fourth, Chen works with Zhejiang University to evaluate a major medical payment reform in China that affects 1 billion population; Fifth, Chen works with the Environmental Health Science Division at Yale on a novel transdisciplinary project, the CHALLENGE (China Longitudinal Environmental, Genetic, and Economic Cohort), that studies 30,000 children aged 0-6 years old who were recruited at conception; Sixth, Chen leads a longitudinal household survey in rural China with a unique social network data collection sponsored by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to better understand social networks and health behaviors.

Chen is a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, President-Elect of the China Health Policy and Management Society (CHPAMS), a reviewer of the National Sciences Foundation (NSF), an associate editor of China Health Review, a reviewer of 30 peer-reviewed journals, and a visiting professor at Peking University and Nanjing University. He has been consulting for United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) and United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). He has been an affiliate of Cornell Population Center and Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences (both Poverty Project and Judgment Project).

Chen's work has been recognized through numerous awards, including the Best China Paper from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) China Sessions (2011), the George Warren Award from Cornell University (2012), the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award from the AAEA (2013), the MacMillan Faculty Research Award at Yale University (2013-2015; 2017-2019), James Tobin Summer Research Award at Yale Economics Department (2014), an award from the National Institutes of Health (2014), the U.S. PEPPER Center Scholar Award (2016), the Kempf Award (2017-2018), the Career Development Award of the National Institute on Aging (2018-2022). His research has been covered in various popular media, such as The Macmillan Report, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Times of London, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and China Central Television.

Chen obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Cornell University in 2012. He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in August 2014.