Multimodal INference and Data Science for Epidemiology and Treatment (MINDSET) is a research programme led by Dr Justin C Yang, Senior Research Fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London.
Mental health is shaped by more than any single diagnosis, dataset, exposure, service contact, or model can capture. My work asks how we can make meaningful and responsible inferences about mental health, vulnerability, and care trajectories from the partial traces people leave across health, education, social, environmental, behavioural, and textual data.
These traces can reveal patterns of need, care, crisis, exclusion, inequality, and recovery. But records are not whole lives. MINDSET brings together psychiatric epidemiology, causal inference, data science, and responsible data governance to study what complex data can tell us, what it can obscure, and how it can be used in ways that are methodologically rigorous, ethically grounded, and accountable to lived experience and public benefit.
Current projects include an ADR UK-funded study using linked health and education data to understand outcomes for neurodivergent young people, and a UKRI Mental Health Platform-funded project examining how socioemotional experiences, including relationships, belonging, adversity, and institutional contact, shape pathways into severe mental illness.
MINDSET works across academic, NHS, public, private, and voluntary sector settings, with a commitment to open science, equitable research inclusion and engagement, and participatory approaches that recognise lived experience as expertise.