MINDSET
Multimodal INference and Data Science for Epidemiology and Treatment (MINDSET) is the research programme established and led by Dr Justin C Yang, Senior Research Fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London.
Mental health develops through interacting processes within people, their environments, and the institutions they encounter. These operate from moments to lifetimes and across homes, communities, services, and population systems. Research observes them only indirectly, through measurements produced in different settings and for different purposes.
Inference is the organising idea in MINDSET. I ask what each source reveals or obscures, how its measurements were generated and selected, and which combinations of evidence can reduce uncertainty about a particular mechanism, trajectory, intervention, or inequality. I bring psychiatric epidemiology, causal inference, and data science together within MINDSET for that purpose.
Empirical work spans experience, context, biology, behaviour, and care, using evidence at the level and timescale best suited to the question. Three enduring questions organise the programme.
What shapes mental health and inequalities over time?
Understanding how conditions and experiences within people, between people, and across the environments and institutions they encounter combine over the life course.
How can heterogeneous evidence support credible inference?
Determining what different measurements can establish, and how evidence can be linked or triangulated across levels, settings, and timescales while remaining explicit about selection, measurement, missingness, and uncertainty.
What evidence systems make rigorous and useful inference possible?
Improving the infrastructures, governance, and analytical practices that enable sensitive human data to support research, services, policy, and public decision-making.
A connected research agenda
I develop MINDSET through time-bounded studies that approach the same questions across different settings, levels, and timescales. WISDOM and HOPE-SEN examine mental-health trajectories and inequalities using complementary longitudinal evidence. Through the UKRI Mental Health Platform, WISDOM also connects perspectives on severe mental illness across the Platform’s hubs. UNITED and a new anti-stigma intervention process evaluation extend the agenda into addiction treatment, professional practice, and service improvement. Work with the North London NHS Foundation Trust Research Database turns methodological and substantive lessons into better governed research infrastructure.
The relationship runs in both directions: substantive questions reveal limitations in existing data; methodological work clarifies what can credibly be inferred; and infrastructure work improves the evidence available for the next study. Individual awards start and finish, but this cycle provides continuity across the wider programme.
Collaboration
Collaboration is part of how I develop MINDSET. I work with researchers, health and public-sector organisations, services, charities, people with lived experience, and trainees when complementary expertise or evidence can materially improve the research.
Research collaborations centre on substantive mental-health questions, credible inference, and the responsible use of data. I also welcome public involvement, service and policy partnerships, and supervision enquiries where there is a clear 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 whose lives and experiences the evidence represents.
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.