Nicholas A. Christakis

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Nicholas A. Christakis
Born (1962-05-07) May 7, 1962
United States
Residence New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Fields Sociology; Biosocial Science, Medicine
Institutions University of Pennsylvania
University of Chicago
Harvard Medical School
Harvard University
Yale University
Alma mater Yale University
Harvard University
University of Pennsylvania
Doctoral advisor Renée Fox
Doctoral students Marcus Alexander, Jonathan Beauchamp, Virginia W. Chang, Peter DeWan, Felix Elwert, Danielle Harvey, Jack Iwashyna, Lei Jin, David Kim, Sae Takada, Alison Hwong, Mark Pachucki, Jessica Perkins, Ming Wen, Coren Apicella (postdoc), Sam Arbesman (postdoc), Jason Block (postdoc), Damon Centola (postdoc), Feng Fu (postdoc), Elizabeth Lamont (postdoc), Jukka Pekka Onnela (postdoc), Niels Rosenquist (postdoc)

Nicholas A. Christakis (born May 7, 1962) is an American sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and on the socioeconomic and biosocial determinants of behavior, health, and longevity. As of July 2013, he is the Sol Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University.[1] He directs the Human Nature Lab, and he is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. 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.[2][3] From 2009 to 2013, Christakis and his wife, Erika Christakis, were Co-Masters of Pforzheimer House, one of Harvard's twelve residential houses.[4]

Christakis is also known for his popular undergraduate lecture class "Life and Death in the USA" which is podcast publicly, and for attracting a diverse group of faculty and students from across University departments and professional schools into his research group.

In 2009, he was named to the Time 100, Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.[5] In 2009 and again in 2010, Christakis was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.[6]

He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006, and he was named a Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010.

Early life and education

Christakis is of Greek heritage.[7]

Christakis received a B.S. in biology from Yale University in 1984, where he won the Russell Henry Chittenden Prize. He received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1989.

In 1989, Christakis moved to Philadelphia, PA, where he completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Health System and then obtained a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. While at the Penn as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, he worked with Renee C. Fox, a distinguished American medical sociologist; other members of his dissertation committee were methodologist Paul Allison and physician Sankey Williams. In his dissertation, which was published as Death Foretold,[8] Christakis studied the role of prognosis in medical thought and practice, documenting and explaining how physicians are socialized to avoid making prognoses. He argued that the prognoses patients receive even from the best-trained American doctors are driven not only by professional norms but also by religious, moral, and even quasi-magical beliefs (such as the "self-fulfilling prophecy").

Christakis trained as a general internist. He completed his residency in 1991 at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He was certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in 1993.

Career

Upon graduating in 1995, he was recruited by the University of Chicago, where he started as an Assistant Professor with joint appointments in Departments of Sociology and Medicine. Six years after arriving at Chicago, Christakis was awarded tenure in both Sociology and Medicine. However, in 2001, Christakis left the University of Chicago to take up a position as Professor of Medical Sociology at Harvard Medical School; in 2005, he was also appointed as Professor of Sociology in the Harvard Department of Sociology; and, in 2009, he was appointed as Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

In 2013, Christakis moved his lab to Yale University, where he is appointed as a Professor of Sociology and a Professor of Medicine.

Research

Nicholas Christakis uses quantitative methods (e.g., mathematical models of network formation, statistical analysis of large observational studies, and experiments) to study social networks and other social factors that affect health. His work has spanned the fields of demography, sociology, sociobiology, behavior genetics, network science, and biosocial science. He is an author or editor of four books, more than 150 peer-reviewed academic articles, and numerous editorials in national and international publications.

Studies by Christakis and James H. Fowler suggested a variety of individuals' attributes like obesity,[9] smoking cessation,[10] and happiness[11] rather than being individualistic, are causally correlated by contagion mechanisms that transmit these behaviors over long distances within social networks.[12] Since then, other work in the Christakis and Fowler Labs has used experimental methods to study social networks,[13][14] and has broadened to use many data sets and approaches.[15] Christakis's Lab at has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and by the Pioneer Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and by other funders. In a TED talk , Christakis summarizes the broader implications of the role of networks in human activity.

In 2009, his group extended the study of social networks to genetics, publishing in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences a finding that social network position may be partially heritable, and specifically that an increase in twins' shared genetic material corresponds to differences in their social networks.[16] And in 2011, Fowler and Christakis published a follow-up paper on "Correlated Genotypes in Friendship Networks" in PNAS.[17] In 2012, in a paper in Nature, the group analyzed the social networks of the Hadza hunter gatherers, showing that human social network structure has ancient origins.[18] Christakis and Fowler (and others) have argued that social networks are deeply related to human cooperation.[13][14]

In 2010, Christakis and Fowler published a paper (based on the spread of H1N1 in Harvard College in 2009) regarding the use of social networks as 'sensors' for forecasting epidemics (of germs and other phenomena),[19] beginning a program of research to deploy social networks to improve health and health care. In another TED talk , Christakis describes this effort and computational social science more generally.

Harvard has licensed some of the technology from Christakis's lab to a start-up company, Activate Networks.

Physician

Christakis has practiced as a home hospice physician, taking care of home-bound, dying patients. In Boston, from 2002 to 2006, Christakis worked as an attending physician on the Palliative Medicine Consult Service at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 2006, he moved to Mount Auburn Hospital, and in 2013, he moved to the Department of Medicine at Yale University.

Books and other writings

Christakis's first book, Death Foretold: Prophecy and Prognosis in Medical Care, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1999.[8]

Along with James Fowler, Christakis is the author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, published in September 2009.[20][21] It was awarded the "Books for a Better Life" Award in 2010 and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. Connected draws on previously published and unpublished studies and makes several new conclusions about the influence of social networks on human health and behavior. In Connected, Christakis and Fowler put forward their "three degrees of influence" rule about human behavior, which theorizes that each person's individual social influence can stretch roughly three degrees before it fades out.[22]

Christakis has also edited two clinical textbooks published by Oxford University Press.[23][24]

Christakis also contributes to popular media. He is a contributor to Edge, and recently argued there that the 21st century will see a new kind of social science. He has published opinion pieces with and without his wife, Erika Christakis, in venues such as Time, the Financial Times, the New York Times, etc., about science and the policy implications of new scientific understandings.

Selected writings

Social Networks

Bereavement, Caregiver Burden, Marriage, and Health

  • Elwert, F; Christakis, NA (February 2006). "Widowhood and Race" (PDF). ASR: American Sociological Review 71 (1): 16–41. 

Prognosis

Biological Networks

References

  1. ↑ Tom Conroy, "New "Institute Will Advance the Interdisciplinary Study of Networks," Yale News April 11, 2013.
  2. ↑ Edge, The Third Culture
  3. ↑ Nicholas Christakis's Page at Harvard Medical School
  4. ↑ Bita M. Asad and Ahmed Mabruk, "Christakises To Be Pfoho House Masters," The Harvard Crimson, February 17, 2009.
  5. ↑ Dan Ariely, "Time 100," Time Magazine.
  6. ↑ "Foreign Policy Magazine"
  7. ↑ "The Greek-American scientist talked to Kathimerini English Edition, explaining, among other things, why we shouldn’t quite expect the ripple effect to reach our office cubicles."
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Gina Kolata, "A CONVERSATION WITH: NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS; A Doctor With a Cause: 'What's My Prognosis?'", The New York Times, November 28, 2000.
  9. ↑ Christakis, Nicholas A.; Fowler, James H. (2007). "The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years". The New England Journal of Medicine 357: 370–379. doi:10.1056/NEJMsa066082. PMID 17652652. 
  10. ↑ Christakis, Nicholas A.; Fowler, James H. (2008). "The Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social Network". The New England Journal of Medicine 358. doi:10.1056/NEJMsa0706154. PMC 2822344. PMID 18499567. 
  11. ↑ Christakis, Nicholas A.; Fowler, James H. (2008). "Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study". British Medical Journal 337 (337): a2338. doi:10.1136/bmj.a2338. PMC 2600606. PMID 19056788. 
  12. ↑ Christakis, Nicholas A.; Fowler, James H. (2009). Connected:The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. Little, Brown and Co. ISBN 978-0316036146. 
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 J.H. Fowler and N.A. Christakis, "Cooperative Behavior Cascades in Social Networks," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (March 2010)
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 D. Rand, S. Arbesman, and N.A. Christakis, "Dynamic Social Networks Promote Cooperation in Experiments with Humans," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (November 2011)
  15. ↑ N.A. Christakis and J.H. Fowler, "Social Contagion Theory: Examining Dynamic Social Networks and Human Behavior," Statistics in Medicine (February 2013)
  16. ↑ J.H. Fowler, C.T. Dawes, and N.A. Christakis, "Model of Genetic Variation in Human Social Networks," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(6): 1720-1724
  17. ↑ J.H. Fowler, J.E. Settle, and N.A. Christakis, "Correlated Genotypes in Friendship Networks," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (January 2011)
  18. ↑ C.L. Apicella, F.W. Marlowe, J.H. Fowler, and N.A. Christakis, "Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers," Nature (January 2012)
  19. ↑ N.A. Christakis and J.H. Fowler, "Social Network Sensors for Early Detection of Contagious Outbreaks," PLoS ONE 5(9) e12948. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012948
  20. ↑ J.H. Fowler and N.A. Christakis, "Connected the Book" official website
  21. ↑ "Hachette Book Group Website"
  22. ↑ Clive Tomson, "Is Happiness Catching," The New York Times, September 14, 2009.
  23. ↑ P. Clare and N.A. Christakis, eds., Prognosis in Advanced Cancer, Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-853022-0
  24. ↑ G. Hanks, N. Cherny, S. Kassa, R. Portenoy, N.A. Christakis, and M. Fallon, eds., Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine, 4th ed., Oxford University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-19-969314-6

External links

Authority control
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