Biography
Arseniy Yashkin, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the School of Health Administration at Texas State University. He completed all of his education at the University of South Florida in Tampa where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics, magna cum laude, in 2000, with a minor in Philosophy and a Certificate in Russian Studies. He went on to earn a Master of Public Health in 2002 and a Master of Arts in Economics in 2006. In 2013 he completed a Doctor of Philosophy in Public Health with a concentration in Health Services Research. His dissertation, which was cited in a 2019 World Health Organization report on alcohol control policy in Russia, examined the dynamics of alcohol consumption in the Russian Federation and the implications of price-related policies for controlling alcohol use.
After completing his doctorate, Dr. Yashkin joined Duke University as a Research Associate in the Department of Economics in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. In 2015 he moved to Duke’s Biodemography of Aging Research Unit as a Research Scientist. He rose to Senior Research Scientist in 2020, the same year he joined the unit’s hiring committee, and was named Associate Research Professor in 2024. In 2026, following more than a decade at Duke, he joined the faculty of Texas State University.
Over his career, Dr. Yashkin has contributed as a co-investigator, senior investigator, or investigator to sixteen completed externally funded research projects. Their sponsors include the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network. His work funded by the National Institute on Aging examined racial and geographic disparities in the risk and survival of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, geographic disparities in mortality and multimorbidity across the United States, Alzheimer’s disease in the context of aging, the genetics of aging, health, and longevity, genetic changes in population age structure and their implications for forecasting Alzheimer’s disease, and bioinformatics approaches to repurposing drugs for Alzheimer’s disease. For the Department of Defense, he helped examine the relationship between traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer’s disease. His earlier projects compared guideline-concordant care with active surveillance for ductal carcinoma in situ, estimated the cost of bladder cancer to Medicare, and studied visual impairment among older adults, the deterrence of drunk driving, the effects of drug treatment courts, and social influences on malaria prevention in sub-Saharan Africa.
After completing his doctorate, Dr. Yashkin joined Duke University as a Research Associate in the Department of Economics in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. In 2015 he moved to Duke’s Biodemography of Aging Research Unit as a Research Scientist. He rose to Senior Research Scientist in 2020, the same year he joined the unit’s hiring committee, and was named Associate Research Professor in 2024. In 2026, following more than a decade at Duke, he joined the faculty of Texas State University.
Over his career, Dr. Yashkin has contributed as a co-investigator, senior investigator, or investigator to sixteen completed externally funded research projects. Their sponsors include the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network. His work funded by the National Institute on Aging examined racial and geographic disparities in the risk and survival of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, geographic disparities in mortality and multimorbidity across the United States, Alzheimer’s disease in the context of aging, the genetics of aging, health, and longevity, genetic changes in population age structure and their implications for forecasting Alzheimer’s disease, and bioinformatics approaches to repurposing drugs for Alzheimer’s disease. For the Department of Defense, he helped examine the relationship between traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer’s disease. His earlier projects compared guideline-concordant care with active surveillance for ductal carcinoma in situ, estimated the cost of bladder cancer to Medicare, and studied visual impairment among older adults, the deterrence of drunk driving, the effects of drug treatment courts, and social influences on malaria prevention in sub-Saharan Africa.
Research Interests
Dr. Yashkin’s research develops and applies quantitative methods for modeling chronic age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, in older adults. Drawing on CMS claims, nationally representative longitudinal surveys, and clinical data, he studies disease onset, progression, and mortality as connected processes. His methodological work includes time-trend partitioning methods that separate changes in disease prevalence and mortality into contributions from incidence, survival, and diagnostic ascertainment. It also includes decomposition approaches that distinguish differential exposure from differential vulnerability in racial, geographic, and socioeconomic disparities. His empirical work has examined how guideline adherence and treatment intensity affect complications and mortality in diabetes and hypertension, and how chronic disease, infections, traumatic brain injury, air pollution, and genetic factors shape dementia risk. He has also evaluated the outcomes and Medicare costs of cancer survivorship and treatment. His current agenda extends the Longitudinal Grade of Membership framework to produce individualized, interpretable forecasts of disease progression across the care continuum: in the community, in home health care, and in nursing homes.
Teaching Interests
Dr. Yashkin’s teaching centers on evidence literacy: the ability to judge whether empirical evidence is credible, fits the purpose, and can support real-world healthcare decisions under uncertainty. At Texas State, he teaches healthcare operations and quality management, and supervisory management for healthcare administrators. He has also designed a graduate elective for MHA and MPH students, Evidence-Based Decision Making in Healthcare. The course bridges quantitative methods and management courses by asking students to assess whether the analyses placed before them can justify the decisions they are used to support. His broader teaching interests include health economics, epidemiology, research methods, and the use of healthcare data in organizational decision-making. He emphasizes self-contained courses that pair rigor with accessibility for students from diverse backgrounds, and assignments that mirror the tasks healthcare administrators and policy analysts face in practice. His approach to teaching is informed by more than a decade of research mentorship, including training early-career collaborators and postgraduate students to analyze nationally representative longitudinal data.