A social scientist and physician, Nicholas Christakis conducts research in the fields of network science, biosocial science, and behavior genetics. Christakis has taught at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and, since 2013, Yale, where he directs the Human Nature Lab and is co-director of the Institute for Network Science. In 2018, Yale awarded him the Sterling Professorship, the university’s highest faculty honor. Christakis was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006; the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010; and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. In 2009, he was named one of Time’s most 100 influential people in the world.

Christakis is the author three books: Death Foretold: Prophesy and Prognosis in Medical Care (Chicago, 1999), Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (Little, Brown Spark, 2009), and, most recently, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (Little, Brown Spark, 2019). He has also written more than 200 scholarly articles, which have appeared in professional journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.