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.
Christakis attracted international media attention in 2007 with the publication in the New England Journal of Medicine of the results of a study in Framingham, MA, which showed that obesity can spread from a person to person through social networks, much like a virus during an epidemic.
Over the next few years, working with his colleague James H. Fowler, now Professor at UCSD, and a team of researchers in his Harvard Medical School group, Christakis published a series of articles arguing that social networks can transmit not only obesity but also other health states and behaviors, including smoking, drinking and happiness. Since then, other work in the Christakis and Fowler Labs has used experimental methods to study social networks, and has broadened to use many data sets and approaches. 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. And in 2011, Fowler and Christakis published a follow-up paper on "Correlated Genotypes in Friendship Networks" in PNAS. 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. Christakis and Fowler (and others) have argued that social networks are deeply related to human cooperation.
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), 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.
Read more about this topic: Nicholas A. Christakis
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