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| Name |
Christakis, Nicholas A. |
| Location
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Yale University |
| Primary Field
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Social and Political Sciences |
| Secondary Field
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Economic Sciences |
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 Research Interests
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Dr. Christakis conducts research in the fields of network science, biosocial science, and various other areas. His current work focuses on how human biology and welfare affect, and are affected by, social interactions and social networks. One line of work in his lab focuses on how health and health behavior in one person can influence analogous outcomes in a person’s social network, via social contagion. This work involves the application of statistical and mathematical models to understand the dynamics of diverse phenomena in longitudinally evolving networks. This work also uses large-scale experiments to examine the spread of knowledge and behaviors (ranging from altruism to breastfeeding, etc.), including in field trials in the developing world directed at improving public health (e.g., in Honduras and India). A second line of work examines the genetic, evolutionary, and physiologic determinants of social network structure, showing that social interactions have been shaped by our genome and also shape it. Related projects that have mapped networks of populations in Tanzania and Sudan who live as all humans did 10,000 years ago. This line of work also involves exploring the spread of the microbiome in human populations and the role of chemosignaling in social interactions. A third line of ongoing work has used artificial intelligence (AI) agents (“bots") to affect social processes in “hybrid systems” of humans and machines. |
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