Education and Early Career
Christakis started his education and academic career in science and medicine. He received his B.S. in Biology from Yale University in 1984, where he ranked top among seniors majoring in the sciences, winning the Chittenden Prize. He then moved to Cambridge, MA, where 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, 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").
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.
Read more about this topic: Nicholas A. Christakis
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