Nicholas Christakis

Dr. Nicholas Christakis is Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Internal Medicine & Biomedical Engineering, and he conducts research on social factors that affect health, health care, and longevity. Dr. Christakis was recently recruited to Yale from Harvard, where he is the Director of the Human Nature Lab and the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His current work involves the application of network science and mathematical models to understand the dynamics of health in longitudinally evolving networks. He has also worked to examine neighborhood effects on health, the accuracy and role of prognosis in medicine, ways of improving end-of-life care, the widowhood effect, and the determinants and outcomes of hospice use.