Affiliated Faculty

James Choi

Professor of Finance

James Choi is a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management. His primary research is in household finance and behavioral finance; his work on automatic enrollment has led to changes in pension plan design around the world. He has also published research on the effects of social identity and how to use psychology to increase preventive health behaviors.

Nicholas Christakis

Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Internal Medicine & Biomedical Engineering

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.

Ted Cohen

Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases)

Dr. Cohen is an infectious disease epidemiologist whose primary research focus is tuberculosis. He is particularly interested in understanding how TB drug-resistance and medical comorbidities such as HIV frustrate current efforts to control epidemics, with an ultimate goal of developing more effective approaches to limit the morbidity caused by this pathogen. Dr. Cohen’s training is in epidemiology and clinical medicine, and his work includes mathematical modeling, fieldwork, and analysis of programmatic data.

Zack Cooper

Associate Professor of Public Health and Economics

Zack Cooper is an Associate Professor of Public Health and Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University. He also serves as Director of Health Policy at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Professor Cooper is a health economist whose work is focused on producing data-driven scholarship that can inform public policy.

Nihar Desai

Associate Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine)

Nihar R. Desai, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Vice Chief of the Section of Cardiovascular Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, an Investigator at the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, and Executive Director for Bundled Payments and Clinical Service Line Operations at the Yale New Haven Health System.

Daniel Esty

Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy, School of the Environment and Clinical Professor of Environmental Law & Policy, Yale Law School

Dan Esty is the Hillhouse Professor at Yale University with primary appointments at Yale’s Environment and Law Schools and a secondary appointment at the Yale School of Management. He serves as director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and co-director of the Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance.

Amir Fairdosi

Lecturer in Political Science, Associate Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of American Politics

Amir Shawn Fairdosi is a Lecturer in Political Science and an Associate Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of American Politics. He teaches classes on American politics, legislative procedure, and political socialization. His current research examines how political institutions influence political attitudes and behavior.

Justin Farrell

Professor of Sociology

Justin Farrell is a professor and author at Yale University, School of the Environment.

He studies culture and environment, with a focus on social class, moral conflict, and epistemology. He blends ethnographic fieldwork in rural communities with large-scale computational techniques from network science and machine learning.

Eli Fenichel

Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics

Eli Fenichel’s research approaches natural resource management and sustainability as a portfolio management problem by considering natural resources as a form of capital. He is interested in how people can and do allocate natural resources and natural resource risks through time. This leads to a strong interest in feedbacks among humans, ecosystems, and the management of coupled ecological-economic processes. His research is applied in a wide variety of systems including: natural capital valuation, fisheries, infectious disease, groundwater, tropical forests, and grasslands.

Howard Forman

Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging; Professor of Economics, Management, and Public Health (Health Policy)

Howie Forman is a Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Public Health (Health Policy), Management, and Economics at Yale University. He came to Yale as a practicing diagnostic radiologist and remains an active clinician in the YNHH Emergency Room, where he also functions as the deputy operational chief for Radiology. Since 1998, he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on healthcare policy, economics, finance, and leadership.