MINDSET
Multimodal INference and Data Science for Epidemiology and Treatment (MINDSET) is the research programme led by Dr Justin C Yang, Senior Research Fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London.
I study how mental health, inequalities, and care unfold across the life course using complex real-world data. People’s experiences are distributed across health services, schools, treatment systems, communities, and environments, while routinely collected data provide incomplete representations of those experiences.
MINDSET develops and applies methods for drawing credible, useful, and responsible inference about mental health from complex real-world data. The programme is organised around three enduring questions.
What shapes mental health and inequalities over time?
Understanding how social, relational, environmental, educational, and institutional experiences influence mental health, service use, and wider outcomes across people, populations, and places.
How can complex real-world data tell us what is actually happening?
Making better use of linked records, electronic health records, clinical free text, longitudinal data, and other sources while remaining attentive to selection, measurement, missingness, and the limits of inference.
How can data systems better support research, services, and public decision-making?
Improving the infrastructures, governance, and analytical practices through which routinely collected data become useful evidence for research, policy, services, and the public.
Current programmes
WISDOM: mental health trajectories and inequalities.
My UKRI Mental Health Platform-funded programme examines how social, emotional, environmental, and institutional experiences shape trajectories into and through severe and enduring mental illness.
HOPE-SEN: administrative data and neurodivergence.
Developed through an ADR UK Fellowship, HOPE-SEN uses linked national health and education data from ECHILD to investigate inequalities in school attendance, exclusion, alternative provision, health outcomes, and related experiences among neurodivergent children and young people.
UNITED: addiction treatment, services, and data.
Within this NIHR Team Science programme, I lead work examining how England’s National Drug Treatment Monitoring System can better support research, policy, clinical practice, and service improvement.
Clinical data and research infrastructure.
As Deputy Lead of the North London NHS Foundation Trust Research Database, I help enable research using routinely collected mental-health records and work with NHS and academic partners to improve access, governance, harmonisation, and cross-site research.
These are time-bounded parts of a wider research agenda. As individual awards conclude and new work develops, the underlying questions remain the organising principles of MINDSET.
Work with MINDSET
MINDSET is collaborative by design, connecting researchers, NHS organisations, public-sector data providers, treatment services, charities, people with lived experience, and policy and research partners across a wider research network.
- Researchers and research groups: collaboration on psychiatric epidemiology, linked data, electronic health records, causal inference, mental-health data science, and related substantive questions.
- NHS, policy, data, and service partners: work on the responsible use of routinely collected data, research infrastructure, evaluation, and questions with practical relevance to services and public decision-making.
- People with lived experience and public partners: involvement in shaping research questions, interpretation, governance, and the use of evidence about health and care.
- Trainees: PhD, MSc, and undergraduate supervision, methods collaboration, teaching, and researcher development where there is a strong fit with the programme.
Across this work, I aim to develop research that is methodologically rigorous, transparent and reproducible, attentive to inequalities, and accountable to the people and communities represented in the data.
Explore the research programme, people and partnerships, publications, research funding, talks and presentations, teaching and supervision, open research and resources, and leadership and recognition, or get in touch.