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Yuyan Shi is a health policy analyst and health economist with research interests in policy and economic analysis of substance use and abuse. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in applied microeconomics and policy analysis with concentration on health economics from Pardee RAND Graduate School (RAND Corporation). She received master's degree in policy analysis from Tsinghua University, and Bachelor's degree from Peking University, China with double major in political science and economics. Before joining UCSD, she was a health economics consultant at the World Bank, and a health economist at the Healthways. Inc.

Dr. Shi’s research concentrates on tobacco, alcohol and marijuana use and abuse. She is interested in understanding the epidemiology and geographic patterns of these behaviors, evaluating the impacts of economics and health policies in vulnerable subgroups and in the general population as a whole, and conducting economic evaluations to assess cost-effectiveness/cost-utility/cost-benefit of behavioral interventions. Dr. Shi is particularly interested in novel tobacco products such as e-cigarettes and hookah, availability of marijuana products, economics of marijuana purchasing behaviors, and impacts of marijuana legalization policies on marijuana use in both adolescent and adult population. She is specialized in economics and statistical modeling, spatial analysis, and policy evaluation using large population data.

Dr. Shi teaches in the UCSD-SDSU Joint Doctoral Program (JDP) on Health Policy for Health Behavior, and in the UCSD Bachelor of Science in Public Health (BSPH) on Health Policy and Healthy Lifestyles. She is also a guest lecturer in BSPH Introduction to Public Health and an instructor for undergraduate independent research.