Koichiro Shiba, Ph.D.

Koichiro Shiba, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health. He studies how social connections, loneliness, and social capital shape health and well-being across the life course, with a particular focus on aging and mental health. His work applies causal inference and rigorous observational methods to large-scale longitudinal and linked contextual data to estimate the effects of social environments and to understand for whom and under what conditions social connection matters. He also brings a global perspective to the study of social connection, including work leveraging cross-national evidence such as the Global Flourishing Study to examine loneliness and well-being across diverse cultural and socioeconomic contexts. In addition, he investigates social connection in an increasingly digitized world, examining how online and offline forms of connection interact and how digital social environments may influence population well-being and inequities.