Dr Yanan Zhang is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, where she leads research with a strong quantitative focus. She also holds an Honorary Research Fellowship at Oxfordshire County Council. Since joining the Institute in 2020, her work has centred on generating robust evidence to inform interventions that support healthy and sustainable ageing across diverse programmes.

Her research interests lie in the economics of population ageing, with a particular emphasis on the cost of informal care, labour market participation among older adults, family dynamics, and broader demographic challenges facing ageing societies. Previously, Dr Zhang worked as a social care economist on the ESRC-funded project Sustainable Care: Connecting People and Systems, where she investigated the economic, health, and well-being impacts of social care, primarily through the analysis of large-scale longitudinal survey data.

Her research has been published in leading academic journals and is regularly presented at international conferences. In addition to her scholarly work, she is actively engaged in policy development, contributing to various policy reports and evidence submissions, including for the Care Leave Bill and the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. She also teaches the postgraduate module Econometrics and Statistical Methods for Social Science Research.

Dr Zhang received her PhD in Economics from the University of Birmingham in 2018, under the supervision of Professors Alessandra Guariglia and David Dickinson. Her doctoral research focused on savings behaviour in later life, the reallocation of resources among older adults, and the efficiency and utilisation of public health insurance schemes.