The key to understanding people is to
understand the ties between them.

Highlights

Nicholas A. Christakis is an internationally recognized authority on how social networks affect our behavior and well-being. One of less than ten people in the U.S. trained as both a sociologist (Ph.D.) and a physician (MD), he specializes in health and social networks and other social factors affecting health, health care and longevity.

For the past decade, Dr. Christakis has focused on how social networks form ("connection") and how they influence behavior ("contagion").

For this groundbreaking work, Dr. Christakis was named to the Time 100 in 2009 and was named "most original thinker" of the year in 2008 on The McLaughlin Group. His research on social networks was featured in Time's Year in Medicine in both 2007 and 2008, and in Harvard Business Review's Breakthrough Ideas of the Year (2009).

Dr. Christakis was recently chosen as number 50 on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list.

He is the coauthor of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, which describes the profound influence social networks have on who we are, what we do and how we feel.

Nicholas Christakis is a Professor of Medical Sociology in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School; Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; and Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

He has conducted widely cited research in numerous public health topics, and has published over 100 scientific articles and chapters, edited medical textbooks, and contributed occasionally to editorial pages at The New York Times and other major media.

He is the author of three books besides Connected (focused on palliative care and prognosis) and has given invited talks all around the world.

His work has appeared on the front pages of The New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and other major media, repeatedly in the past three years.

Connected

Watch a clip on Connected Click here.

How social networks shape who we are, what we do and how we feel.

The key to understanding people is to understand the ties between them.

It is customary to think about fashions in things like clothes or music as spreading in a social network. But all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, flow through social networks, and this process obeys certain rules. Dr. Christakis has become internationally renowned for his research on how our social networks drive and shape aspects of our lives that we would never suspect.

In his book Connected, he describes the results of this groundbreaking research, unlocking a revolutionary new understanding of the sway that we have over one another through our connections. He outlines the fundamental rules governing the formation and operation of social networks and describes the myriad ways that they help to shape who we are and what we do.

Dr. Christakis specializes in the health impacts of our social networks, having analyzed a huge social network of 12,000 people followed over thirty years.

Credentials

• Professor of Medical Sociology, Harvard Medical School
• Professor of Sociology, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences
• Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
• Elected to the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Science
• BS, Yale University; MD, Harvard Medical School; MPH, Harvard School of Public
• Health; PhD, University of Pennsylvania