Yingxiao Yan

PhD Project title: Impact of combined Exposures on Metabolic Health (ICE)

Effective preventive actions for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) require understanding what environmental factors affect the risk of having NCDs and the underlying biochemical pathophysiological mechanisms. Although studies have linked independent environmental exposures to specific NCDs and investigated explicit interactions between exposures, such studies usually have not systematically taken unknown interactions between multiple exposures into consideration. Moreover, the casual mechanisms between combined exposures and health outcomes are mostly unknown since methodologies for evaluating the effect of multiple exposures on metabolic pathways are lacking. Combing machine learning and epidemiological modeling, the aim of my project is to evaluate how combined environmental exposures (diet, microbiota, and pollutants) regulate metabolic pathways (metabolomics/metabolites) and how that regulation, in turn, relates to risk factors for NCDs (BMI, blood lipids, glucose, blood pressure, etc) and NCDs.

Supervisors

Main: Carl Brunius, Assoc Professor, Division of Food and Nutrition Science, Department of Biology and Biological Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology.

Assistant: Anton Ribbenstedt, PhD, Division of Food and Nutrition Science, Department of Biology and Biological Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology. Agneta Åkesson, Professor, nutritional and environmental epidemiology, Karolinska Institute. Ingegerd Johansson, Professor, nutritional epidemiology, Umeå University.

Location

Affiliation: Division of Food and Nutrition Science, Department of Biology and Biological Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology.

About Yan

Yingxiao Yan holds a Master’s in Public Health from Lund University, Sweden, and a BSc in Chemistry, Nanjing University, China. Yan has a focus on developing data analysis algorithms and applying them in big datasets. He has a wide interest in biostatistics, epidemiology, and machine learning. “My passion is not on exploring how specific exposures, such as diet, pollutants, influence our health, but I want to see the big pictures of associations behind multiple exposures, metabolomics, and our health.”

Contact

Read more about Yan here on LinkedIn!

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