Xiao-Mei Mai

Xiao-Mei Mai is a Professor at the Department of Community Medicine and Nursing, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, NTNU. She holds a PhD in Medicine from Linköping University (2003) and a Medical degree from Capital Medical University, China (1992). Her research focuses on medical epidemiology, epigenetics, obesity, female reproductive factors, physical activity, causal inference, cancer, lung diseases, and vitamin D.

Her work primarily utilizes the HUNT Study cohort to investigate chronic disease associations. Key areas include vitamin D’s role in chronic illnesses (e.g., lung disease, metabolic disorders, cancer), reproductive factors as risk factors for chronic diseases, Mendelian randomization, and epigenetic epidemiology. She has published extensively in journals like European Respiratory Journal, Scientific Reports, and BMC Cancer.

Her research highlights vitamin D’s relationship with cognitive function, dental health, and hypertension, alongside obesity-mortality links via genetic analyses. She has collaborated on studies involving COPD comorbidity clusters, asthma-COPD overlap, and lung cancer risk factors.

Professional experience includes roles at SINTEF Health Research, University of Ottawa, and postdoctoral fellowships at Canadian and Swedish institutions. Her work emphasizes causal inference methods and population health research.