Nicholas A Christakis Popular Books

Nicholas A Christakis Biography & Facts

Nicholas A. Christakis (born May 7, 1962) is a Greek-American sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and on the socioeconomic, biosocial, and evolutionary determinants of human welfare (including the behavior, health, and capability of individuals and groups). He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab. He is also the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. Christakis was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006; of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010; and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. In 2021, he received an honorary degree from the University of Athens, Greece. In 2009, Christakis was named to the Time 100, Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2009 and again in 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. Early life Christakis' parents are Greek. They had three biological children and then adopted two others, an African-American girl and a Taiwanese boy. His father was a nuclear physicist turned business consultant and his mother a physical chemist turned psychologist. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1962 when both his parents were Yale University graduate students. His family returned to Greece when he was three, and Greek became his first language. He returned to the United States with his family at age six and grew up in Washington, D.C. He graduated from St. Albans School (Washington, D.C.). Education Christakis obtained a B.S. degree in biology from Yale University in 1984, where he won the Russell Henry Chittenden Prize. He received an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School and an M.P.H. degree from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1989, winning the Bowdoin Prize on graduation. In 1991, Christakis completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Health System. He was certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in 1993. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995. While at the University of Pennsylvania as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, he studied with Renee C. Fox, a distinguished American medical sociologist; other members of his dissertation committee were methodologist Paul Allison and physician Sankey Williams. His dissertation was published as Death Foretold, his first book. Career In 1995, Christakis started as an assistant professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Sociology and of Medicine at the University of Chicago. In 2001, he was awarded tenure in both Sociology and Medicine. He left the University of Chicago to take up a position at Harvard in 2001. Until July 2013, he was a professor of medical sociology in the Department of Health Care Policy and a professor of medicine in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; a professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and an attending physician at the Harvard-affiliated Mt. Auburn Hospital. In 2013, Christakis moved to Yale University, where he is a professor of social and natural science in the Department of Sociology, with additional appointments in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Statistics and Data Science; Biomedical Engineering; Medicine; and in the School of Management. He served as the Sol Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science until 2018, when he was appointed as a Sterling Professor, the highest honor bestowed on Yale faculty. From 2009 to 2013, Christakis and his wife, Erika Christakis, were Co-Masters of Pforzheimer House, one of Harvard's twelve residential houses. From 2015 to 2016, he served in a similar capacity at Silliman College at Yale University. Research Christakis uses quantitative methods (e.g., experiments, mathematical models, and statistical analyses). His work focuses on network science and biosocial science, and it has also involved sociology, economics, demography, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, behavior genetics, and epidemiology. He is an author or editor of six books, more than 200 peer-reviewed academic articles, numerous editorials in national and international publications, and at least three patents. His laboratory is also active in the development and release of software to conduct large-scale social science experiments, pioneering its use beginning in 2009 (e.g., Breadboard, Trellis). Christakis' early work was on physician decision-making and end-of-life care. He first began to study interpersonal social network effects in this setting in the late 1990s, with a series of studies of the widowhood effect, whereby the death of one person might increase the risk of death of their spouse. He developed a number of innovative ways to estimate the causal nature of these effects (e.g., by studying how the death of a man's ex-wife might affect his risk of death), and he expanded the scope of such work to analyze, for instance, how the precise diagnosis or duration of illness of the decedent might modify the risk of death of their survivor or how better quality of health care given to a dying person might reduce the risk of death of their survivor. He also explored, in a 2006 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine that analyzed 518,240 elderly couples, how hospitalization of a spouse, and not just their death, might affect a survivor's mortality risk. These were all early studies in network effects, but they involved just simple dyads of people (pairs of spouses). Beginning in 2004, Christakis began to study "hyper-dyadic" network effects, whereby processes of social contagion moved beyond pairs of people. Initially using observational studies with his colleague James H. Fowler, he documented that a variety of phenomena like obesity, smoking, and happiness, rather than being solely individualistic, also arise via social contagion mechanisms over some distance within social networks (see: "three degrees of influence"). Other work by Christakis and Fowler, and by Christakis and other collaborators, used experimental methods and diverse data sets and settings to study social networks, thereby enhancing the robustness of causal inference (e.g., in a 2010 paper that showed that altruistic behavior in college students, or in a 2015 paper that showed that vitamin use in developing-world villages could both be made to be contagious). Indeed, the 2010 experiment demonstrated that cooperative behavior could spread to three degrees of separation. A 2022 paper used another experiment to show how a novel "pair targeting" algorithm could enhance population-level social contagion of the adoption of iron-fortified salt to reduce anemia in mothers and children. In a 2010 TED talk, Christakis summarized the broader implications of the role of networks in human.... Discover the Nicholas A Christakis popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Nicholas A Christakis books.