JUSTIN YANG
Finding the next step
The UKRI Mental Health Platform brings together researchers working across severe mental illness, with a strong emphasis on collaboration across hubs and meaningful partnership with people who have lived and living experience. The cross-hub fellowship appealed to me because it aligned with how I already work. My research sits at the intersection of psychiatric epidemiology, data science, and causal inference, and I am most energised when I am connecting ideas and methods across disciplines rather than staying within a single silo.
As my Administrative Data Research UK fellowship was coming to an end, I was thinking seriously about what the next step should look like. I wanted to deepen my methodological work while staying grounded in real problems faced by people with complex and enduring mental health needs. The possibility of building links between the Social Health Hub, the Complex Emotions Hub, and DATAMIND felt like a natural progression of my work. It offered both intellectual stretch and genuine collaborative potential.
My involvement with the MHR Incubator, particularly the 2024 Peer Coaching programme, shaped how I approached that moment.
When I was selected for the Peer Coaching programme in 2024 (supported by the Addiction Healthcare Goals), I was not at my most confident. I had begun to question whether I had a long-term place in mental health and addictions research. The programme created a structured space to reflect on those doubts rather than ignore them. What I valued most was the honesty. We were encouraged to articulate what was not working, what we were afraid of, and what we actually wanted from our careers.
Through those conversations, I became clearer about my direction. I realised that I did bring value to mental health research and that I did not want to pursue opportunities simply because they were available. I wanted to be intentional. I wanted to build programmes of work that connected rigorous methods with meaningful impact. That clarity changed how I approached the UKRI Mental Health Platform application. I allowed myself to be more ambitious about cross-hub integration and more explicit about the kind of researcher I am trying to become.
The Incubator Gatherings also helped in a practical sense. They broadened my network within mental health research and gave me a community of peers who I could sense-check ideas with. Around that period, I secured my ADR UK fellowship, went on to lead a successful NIHR Team Science Award, and then applied for the UKRI Mental Health Platform fellowship. The trajectory was not accidental.
The PeCo experience gave me renewed focus and the confidence to act on it.
My next steps are to complete and disseminate outputs from my ADR UK fellowship, particularly work linking administrative data to improve outcomes for neurodivergent young people, while fully embedding myself within the Mental Health Platform. I am now working across hubs to build a coherent programme around social exposures, complex emotional needs, and advanced data science methods. Alongside this, I am delivering on NIHR-funded work. It is a demanding portfolio, but one that feels aligned and true to me as a researcher.
For me, the MHR Incubator did not simply provide career development support. It gave me space to reflect, recalibrate, and move forward with intention.
About the authors
Dr Justin Yang is a Senior Research Fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London. His research examines how mental health, vulnerability, and care trajectories can be understood from complex real-world data, including health records, linked administrative data, text, environmental exposures, and other forms of longitudinal evidence.
