About Me
Assistant Professor
Department of Allied Health Sciences,
College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources,
University of Connecticut
Email: ran.2.xu@uconn.edu
Research Interest: Quantitative Methods, Computational Social Science, Social Networks, Health Education, Behavior, Prevention and Policy.
My research focuses on applied data science and systems science, with applications in substantive areas such as health behavior and disease prevention.
Specifically, my research has two streams:
The first stream of my research focuses on using systems science tools to solve health problems. Factors/individuals in almost all health systems are interrelated – each individual influences each other’s decisions, and each factor is both the cause and the consequence of some other factors. Examining such systems challenges the traditional practice of treating individuals as independent observations or only focusing on a few factors when making decisions, and requires systems science tools to map out the system holistically and account for interdependencies between individual components. My research in this area includes (1) studying how social networks shape people’s health behavior/belief and how social networks are formed, (2) employing computational (e.g., agent-based modeling and system dynamics modeling) models to study the complex relations between factors at play in a decision system, and identify the strategies or policy levers that can best change the system, and (3) applying econometric and data science approaches to establish causal inferences and evaluate the key links in these systems.
The second stream of my research focuses on development and application of new methods and technological tools to study health problems. Trained as an applied statistician, I am interested in developing new statistical methods and related apps (e.g., sensitivity analysis method to evaluate the robustness of causal inferences; network method to estimate social influence that are accessible to empirical health researchers. I am also interested in evaluating the feasibility of applying various state-of-the-art technological tools (e.g., AI-based image recognition, large-scale mobility tracking) to study individual and community health behaviors. My publications have appeared in many high-impact interdisciplinary or specialized journals such as Lancet Planetary Health, Nature Communications, Bioscience, Computers in Human Behavior, Health Affairs, The Organizational Research Methods, BMJ Global Health, Journal of Medical Internet Research, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, and Obesity.
I received my Ph.D. in Measurement and Quantitative Methods from the College of Education at Michigan State University in 2016. I completed my postdoctoral training in the Grado Department of Industrial & System Engineering at Virginia Tech in 2019.