NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS is an internationally recognized physician and social scientist. He is a Professor at Harvard University with joint appointments in the Departments of Sociology, Medicine, and Health Care Policy, and he was formerly a Professor at the University of Chicago. For the last ten years, working in the field of biosocial science, he has been studying the mathematical, biological, psychological, and sociological underpinnings of social network structure and function.

Dr. Christakis received his BS from Yale in Biology in 1984, his MD and MPH from Harvard in 1989, and his PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science in 2006 and made a fellow of the AAAS in 2010.  He has published over 150 scientific articles and chapters, co-authored (with James Fowler) Connected, edited medical textbooks, and also contributed to the editorial pages of various newspapers. He has been the recipient of teaching awards at Harvard, and the podcasts of his Harvard lectures, available at iTunes, are widely listened to outside of that institution.