Bio

2026-27 GES Graduate Certificate Fellow

Yefei Xiao is a third-year Ph.D. student in Lifespan Developmental Psychology at NC State. Her research examines how psychosocial stressors experienced across the lifespan, particularly socioeconomic status (SES), become biologically embedded and shape the health trajectories among the middle-aged and older adults. Through the GES program, Yefei aims to build expertise in (epi)genomic analysis methods to investigate the molecular pathways linking life-course SES to health disparities in older adulthood. By integrating psychosocial and genomic approaches, her work seeks to advance understanding of how social inequality “gets under the skin” to affect aging processes, with implications for interventions aimed at reducing health disparities across the lifespan.

Publications

• Energy-adjusted Dietary Inflammatory Index mediates the association between obesity and depressive symptoms: a population-based analysis of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2007–2018 , British Journal Of Nutrition (2026)
• Mediating Role of Depression in the Relationship between Allostatic Load and Mortality , SSRN Electronic Journal (2025)