Hong Xue, PhD

Dr. Hong Xue is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Administration and Policy. Xue’s work has been funded by NIH, NSF, and foundations (e.g., U54, R01, and VFHY large grant). He is a recent recipient of the prestigious Translational Scholar Award from the NIH funded Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research. He is the Director of the Big Data and Systems Science Modeling Lab. Dr. Xue conducts interdisciplinary research in public health and in particular, integrates economics, nutrition, epidemiology, and systems science in studying multilevel mechanisms and factors (e.g., from policy to behavior) related to obesity and non-communicable chronic diseases (NCDs), and smoking (including e-cigarettes). His primary research interests are in health economics, nutritional epidemiology, systems science and modeling, (childhood) obesity, mHealth, and big data and machine learning. He is a leading expert in systems modeling of obesity epidemiology. He is interested in systems approach-oriented economic and nutritional epidemiological research on obesity and NCDs prevention and control in domestic and international settings. Before coming to Mason, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Behavior, School of Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University, and and Associate Member of the Massey Cancer Center.

Research

Research Interests

• Childhood obesity
• Health economics
• Nutritional epidemiology
• Systems simulation modeling
• Smoking
• Spatial analysis
• Big data analytics

Select Publications

• Lin SY, Cheng X, Zhang J, Yannam JS, Barnes AJ, Koch JR, Hayes R, Gimm G, Zhao X, Purohit H, Xue H. Social Media Data Mining of Antitobacco Campaign Messages: Machine Learning Analysis of Facebook Posts. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2023 Feb 13;25:e42863.

• Lin SY, Zhou W, Koch JR, Barnes AJ, Yang R, Xue H. The Association Between Tobacco Retailer Outlet Density and Prevalence of Cigarette Smoking in Virginia. Nicotine and Tobacco Research. 2023 Jan 1;25(1):36-42.

• Cheng X, Lin S, Wang K, Hong A, Zhao X, Gress D, Wojtusiak J, Cheskin L, Xue H. Recipe sharing on Pinterest- healthfulness assessment through nutrition information analysis and natural language processing. The Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2021;23(4):e25757.

• Cheng X, Lin S, Liu J, Liu S, Zhang J, Nie P, Fuemmeler BF, Wang Y, Xue H. Does Physical Activity Predict Obesity—A Machine Learning and Statistical Method-Based Analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2021; 18(8):3966.

• Wang Y, Zhao L, Gao L, Pan A, Xue H. Obesity in China: Public health and policy implications. The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology. 2021;9(7):446-461.

• Xue H, Liu J, Cheskin LJ, Sheppard VB. Discrepancy between perceived diet quality and actual diet quality among US adult cancer survivors. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2020: 1-8.

• Xue H, Slivka L, Huang T, Igusa T, Wang Y. Applications of systems modeling in obesity research. Obesity Review. 2018 Sep;19(9):1293-1308.

Affiliations

• Member

   
  American Society for Nutrition
• Member

   
  The Obesity Society
• Member

   
  International Health Economics Association
• Member

   
  AcademyHealth

Degrees

• PhD, Nutritional Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins University
• PhD, Economics, Virginia Tech