1. Director
Prof. Youfa Wang, MD, PhD, MS, FTOS, is the founding dean of the Xi’an Jiaotong University Global Health Institute, the John and Janice Fisher Endowed Chair of Wellness, Associate Director of the Fisher Institute of Health and Well-being, and Professor of Nutrition and Health Science in the College of Health, Ball State University, and an adjunct professor in Johns Hopkins University and Tianjin Medical University. Previously, he was Professor of Epidemiology, Environmental Health and Pediatrics, Department Chair in State University of New York at Buffalo; Funding Director of the Global Center on Childhood Obesity Prevention and Control and Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He is an expert consultant of the WHO and the United Nations, Vice President of the Chinese Society on Global Health. He has served as the Chair of the American Society for Nutrition-Nutritional Epidemiology Section, Chair of The Obesity Society (TOS) Pediatric Obesity Section and President of the North America Chinese Society for Nutrition. His research interests include epidemiology, nutrition, childhood obesity, noncommunicable chronic diseases, global health, big data, systems models, and mHealth. As an internationally renowned professor, he has published more than 250 papers and some are cited more than 2000 times. As a principal investigator, he has secured about $23 million in NIH research grants including multiple R01 grants and a more than $16 million NIH U54 center grant. His research has been funded by the UNICEF, NIH, US Department of Agriculture, The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), etc. He has fostered and established interdisciplinary and international collaborations in large research projects.
2.Mission and Goals
With the supporting of the superior resources of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health and the "Management Science and Engineering" discipline of the School of Management, the Center for Systems Science and Health Big Data takes advantage of the modern big data, cloud computing, mobile devices and other informatics and mathematical technologies to collect and integrate the data of public health, clinical medicine, health physical examination and scientific investigation from Shaanxi province, western China, domestic and foreign, carry out basic and applied research on health big data collection, data mining and statistics, establish health-related databases, promote data sharing and use. The prevention and control of chronic diseases, the development of smart medicine and personalized medicine, and the pathogenesis of diseases and the development of new drugs provide technical and evidence support.
3. Main Research Directions
1)Application of system science methods in the fields of medicine and public health
2)Theoretical and applied research on health big data
3)The establishment and use of large health-related databases
4)R & D, promotion and evaluation of mobile health related technologies
5)Application of classical biostatistics in global health research
