Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. A sociologist and physician, his research focuses on social networks and biosocial science. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale. His current research is mainly focused on two topics: (1) the social, mathematical, and biological rules governing how social networks form (“connection”) and (2) the social and biological implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (“contagion”). His lab uses both observational and experimental methods to study these phenomena, exploiting techniques from sociology, computer science, biosocial science, demography, statistics, behavior genetics, evolutionary biology, epidemiology, and other fields.
