Nicholas A. Christakis

Nicholas A. Christakis (born May 7, 1962) is an American physician and social scientist 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. 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. From 2009 to 2013, Christakis and his wife, Erika Christakis, were Co-Masters of Pforzheimer House, one of Harvard's twelve residential houses.

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. In 2009 and again in 2010, Christakis was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.

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.

Christakis is of Greek descent.