Qinyun Lin, Ph.D.
林沁筠 (she/her/hers)
Email: qinyun.lin@gu.se
Guldhedsgatan 5A, plan 3
Gothenburg, Sweden
I am a Senior Lecturer and Docent (Associate Professor equivalent) in Health Science Statistics at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Institute of Medicine, Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg.
Broadly, I am a methodologist interested in developing quantitative methods that better reflect the social and spatial contexts in which people live. My goal is to generate evidence that is both methodologically rigorous and meaningful for improving health and educational equity.
A central theme of my work is to humanize quantitative research by developing methods that better capture the complex interplay between individuals and the social, structural, and spatial environments in which they live, while preserving the rigor, transparency, and interpretability of statistical inference.
Research Interests
- Causal inference
- Sensitivity analysis
- Spatial epidemiology
- Social determinants of Health
- Health and education inequalities
Research Highlights
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Spatial epidemiology. We develop Bayesian spatial methods for disease mapping and targeting cancer screening, as illustrated by a Bayesian bivariate spatial modeling framework for stage-specific cancer incidence (American Journal of Epidemiology, 2026).
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Statistical methodology. We develop and apply sensitivity analysis methods for causal inference, building on the foundational Impact Threshold for a Confounding Variable (ITCV) and Robustness of Inference to Replacement (RIR) frameworks (Social Science Research, 2022). Our work extends ITCV to mediation analysis (Psychological Methods, 2023) and RIR to account for interference (violations of SUTVA) in teacher effectiveness evaluation (Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 2026).
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Health equity and social determinants of health. We apply quantitative methods to understand how structural, social, and environmental determinants shape population health and health inequalities, with applications to food environments and obesity-related cancer mortality (BMC Medicine, 2025) and structural barriers underlying COVID-19 mortality disparities (JAMA Network Open, 2022).