Jun He, PhD, MPH

Dr. Jun He joined Dr. Renato Polimanti’s lab in the Yale Psychiatry Division of Human Genetics as a postdoctoral associate in late 2022. His research focuses on the etiology and prevention of major chronic non-communicable diseases using genetic, epidemiological and machine learning approaches. Specifically, he applies genetically informed causal inference analyses to understand the relationship between different brain-related outcomes, including psychiatric disorders, Alzheimer's disease, hearing difficulty, brain imaging phenotypes, and behavioral health. Dr. He is also a research associate of CSP #2006/MVP029: Genomics of Gulf War Illness (GWI) in the Million Veteran Program (MVP), where he investigates genetic and environmental factors that influence the onset of GWI. In 2024, he received a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Innovation Grant from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) to fund his research on genetic mechanisms and risk prediction of suicide.

Dr. Jun He received his BS, MPH and PhD degrees from Central South University Xiangya School of Public Health. In his PhD, he investigated the effects of socioeconomic status, behavioral factors, and major historical events on the development of chronic diseases, and established a high-performing predictive model for metabolic syndrome using a next-generation machine learning framework, which won the First Prize in Hunan Province at the 2022 (8th) National University Statistical Modeling Competition.