Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University

Nicholas Christakis

RWJF Health Policy Program Director,

• Nicholas Christakis's web site

Nicholas Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., is an internist and sociologist who conducts research on the social determinants of individual and collective health. He is Professor of Medical Sociology in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School; he is also active as an Attending Physician in the Palliative Medicine Program at Massachusetts General Hospital; and he is an Affiliate of the Department of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University. He co-directs The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research program at Harvard.

Dr. Christakis' past work has examined the accuracy and role of prognosis in medicine, ways of improving end-of-life care, factors associated with hospice use, and the impact of hospice care on the health of bereaved spouses. His book on prognosis, 'Death Foretold: Prophecy and Prognosis in Medical Care', was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1999 and has been broadly reviewed.

Currently, he is principally concerned with health and social networks, and specifically with how ill health, health risks, and death in one person can have like consequences for others in a person's social network. Some current work is focused on the health benefits of marriage and on how ill health in one spouse can have cascading effects on the other spouse. It seems likely that improving the health of one partner in a marriage can have meaningful effects on the health of the other, and that both parties would value this - in a way that influences health policy.

A separate line of research involves developing the conceptual and practical foundations of the problem of iatrogenesis and examining physicians' responses to the problem of medical harm.

His research has implications for understanding why people become sick and how they use medical care to become well again. It also has implications for clinical and policy actions to enhance the quality of care given to seriously ill patients.

Dr. Christakis received his B.S. degree from Yale University, his M.D. and M.P.H. degrees from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Christakis serves on several medical and social science editorial boards and federal research funding committees. He teaches quantitative and qualitative research design, medical sociology, health services research, and palliative medicine.