Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis is Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science and director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University. His research across a range of fields explores how social networks and biological forces shape human outcomes. The author of four books and over 240 articles, Dr. Christakis is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2015, Dr. Christakis was at the center of the storm triggered by his wife’s email about racially sensitive Halloween costumes at Yale. His defense of the email prompted a swift backlash in which students demanded his and his wife’s resignations as Silliman college masters. Dr. Christakis refused to resign. At the end of the academic year, he stepped down from his role at Silliman. Later, Yale gave him its highest faculty distinction of Sterling Professor Chair.
Dr. Christakis has been a consistent defender of free expression before and after the Yale incident. Together with his wife, Dr. Erika Christakis, he came to the defense of minority students who were using satire to criticize elite clubs at Harvard in 2012. During the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, he expressed concern that hospitals and medical schools were silencing faculty and staff who were highlighting problems with the response to the pandemic. The same year, he joined other notable academics in signing "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate" ("Harper's Letter") expressing concern that "the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted". He now serves on the advisory councils of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the Heterodox Academy.
For his consistent advocacy of free speech at Universities, the Columbia Academic Freedom Council is honored to present Dr. Nicholas Christakis with the 2025 Academic Freedom Award.
