hi , i am
J Yan .

A Social Data Scientist

download resume

about me

I am a computational social scientist dedicated to understanding health inequalities with advanced AI algorithms.

I specialise in the study of health disparities in mortality and morbidity, leveraging machine learning, deep learning algorithms, and explainable Artificial Intelligence. My particular emphasis is on health-related issues concerning the aging population, and I'm keen on unraveling the influence of social determinants on health outcomes to expose health inequalities. This understanding assists in proposing prevention-oriented policies, thereby bridging the health inequality gap.

address

42 Park End Street, Oxford

email

jiani.yan@sociology.ox.ac.uk

profile_image

education

2014 - 2018

BSc
Computer Science

Southwestern University of Finance Economics

Chengdu, China

2018 - 2019

MSc
Financial Economics

University of Birmingham

Birmingham, United Kingdom

2020 - 2022

MPhil
Sociology & Demography

University of Oxford

Oxford, United Kingdom

2022 - Now

DPhil
Computational Social Science

university of oxford

oxford, united kingdom

publications

  1. Mills, M., Rahal, C., Brazel, D., Yan, J., & Gieysztor, S. (2020). COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment: Behaviour, ethics, misinformation and policy strategies. London: The Royal Society & The British Academy.
  2. Leasure, D.R., Yan, J., Bondarenko, M., Kerr, D., Fatehkia, M., Weber, I., & Kashyap, R. (2023). Digital Gender Gaps Web Application, v1.0.0. Zenodo, GitHub. doi:10.5281/zenodo.7897491. GitHub Repository
  3. Leasure, D.R., Kashyap, R., Rampazzo, F., Dooley, C.A., Elbers, B., Bondarenko, M., Verhagen, M., Frey, A., Yan, J., Akimova, E.T., Fatehkia, M., Trigwell, R., Tatem, A.J., Weber, I., & Mills, M.C. (2023). Nowcasting Daily Population Displacement in Ukraine through Social Media Advertising Data. Population and Development Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.12558
  4. Yan, J., & Rahal, C. (2025). On the unknowable limits to prediction. Nature Computational Science, 5, 188–190. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-025-00776-y

work in progress

  1. Rahal, C., Yan, J. (2022). ‘From a Single Seed Grows a Forest of Uncertainty’. In progress/preparation for submission to leading journals and conferences.
  2. Rahal, C., Valdenegro, D., Yan, J. (2025). ‘Introducing Robustify: An efficient multiversal library with model selection, averaging, and out-of-sample analysis’. In preparation for submission to leading journals and conferences.
  3. Breen, C. F., Fatehkia, M., Yan, J., Zhao, X., Leasure, D. R., Weber, I., Kashyap, R. (2024). ‘Mapping subnational gender gaps in internet and mobile adoption using social media data’.
  4. Yan, J. (2025). ‘Revisiting the social determinants of health with explainable AI: a cross-country perspective’. Under review.
  5. Yan, J. (2024). ‘Bridging Social Factors to Pathological Outcomes: A Deep-Learning Pseudo Imaging based Approach’. In progress/preparation for submission to leading journals and conferences.