Yuan Zhang

Dr. Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health and a core faculty member of the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center. Her research integrates theories and methods from gerontology, demography, economics, and epidemiology to study the social variability in aging processes and the underlying biosocial pathways leading to healthy longevity across places and time. She uses data from large-scale biosocial surveys of health and aging to examine how social and economic factors influence the biological, physical, and cognitive aging processes and the morbidity and mortality experiences of different populations, with an emphasis on populations in less economically developed countries.