Nicholas A. Christakis

Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a social scientist and physician who conducts research on social factors that affect health, health care, and longevity. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He is the Sol Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. Dr. Christakis’s current research is focused on the relationship between social networks and health. People are inter-connected, and so their health is inter-connected. This research engages two types of phenomena: the social, mathematical, and biological rules governing how social networks form (“connection”), and the biological and social implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (“contagion”).

http://www.nicholaschristakis.net
http://www.humannaturelab.net

Daniel Spielman

Daniel Alan Spielman received his B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Yale in 1992, and his Ph.D in Applied Mathematics fromM.I.T. in 1995. He spent a year as a NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computer Science Department atU.C. Berkeley, and then became a professor in the Applied Mathematics Department at M.I.T.  He moved to Yale University in 2006, where he is the Sterling Professor of Computer Science, Statistics and Data Science, and Mathematics.

He has received many awards, including the 1995 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the 2002 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award, the 2008 and 2015 Godel Prize, the 2009 Fulkerson Prize, the 2010 Nevanlinna Prize, the 2014 Polya Prize, an inaugural Simons Investigator Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship.  He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.  His main research interests include the design andanalysis of algorithms, network science, machine learning, digital communications and scientific computing.

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/spielman/
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/spielman/Research/List.html

Tom Keegan

Tom Keegan is Executive Director of YINS, providing administrative leadership to the institute and contributing to long-term strategic planning for its current and future position at Yale and in the larger world of network science research. He oversees programs and projects advancing the educational, research, and service missions of YINS, as well as those that seek to forge partnerships between YINS and entities outside of Yale. Tom has a Ph.D. in social psychology from Cornell University and has been working in research administration for the last twelve years. In addition to his role at YINS, Tom is Lab Director for the Human Nature Lab of YINS Co-Director Nicholas Christakis.

Emily Hau

Emily is the Director of Programs and Partnerships at YINS. She has worked at Yale since 2008. Emily received her BA in geography from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2006, before studying international business law at the American University of Paris. Upon her return to the United States, she was recruited for a postgraduate fellowship in developmental social neuroscience at the Yale University School of Medicine. She co-founded the Give Speech Foundation, a nonprofit with a simple mission: to make augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technology better, cheaper, and more accessible. Emily firmly believes smiles are contagious (she’s right) and that Yale University is the happiest place on earth.

Amin Karbasi

Amin Karbasi is an Associate Professor of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research lies at the intersection of learning theory, large-scale networks, and optimum information processing. From 2013 until 2014, he was a post-doctoral scholar in the learning and adaptive systems group at ETHZ. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL in 2012. Dr. Karbasi is the recipient of the ETH research fellowship grant (2013), winner of the Patrick Denantes memorial prize (2013) for the best Ph.D. thesis in the school of computer and communication sciences at EPFL, co-recipient of ICASSP best student paper award (2011), co-recipient of ACM SIGMETRICS best student paper award (2010), and the runner-up for ISIT best student paper award (2010).

http://www.eng.yale.edu/iid/

Leandros Tassiulas

Leandros’ research interests are in the field of networking with emphasis on mathematical models and algorithms of complex networks, architectures and protocols of wireless systems, sensor networks, mobile services, novel internet architectures and experimental platforms for network research. His most notable contributions include the max-weight scheduling algorithm and the back-pressure network control policy, opportunistic scheduling in wireless, the maximum lifetime approach for wireless network energy management, and the consideration of joint access control and antenna transmission management in multiple antenna wireless systems.

Leandros Tassiulas is the current Department Chair Electrical Engineering at the Yale University School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is the John C. Malone Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a Fellow of IEEE (2007). His research has been recognized by several awards including the IEEE Koji Kobayashi computer and communications award in 2016, the inaugural INFOCOM 2007 Achievement Award “for fundamental contributions to resource allocation in communication networks,” the INFOCOM 1994 best paper award, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Initiation Award (1992), an NSF CAREER Award (1995), an Office of Naval Research  Young Investigator Award (1997) and a Bodossaki Foundation award (1999). He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park (1991). He has held faculty positions at Polytechnic University, New York, University of Maryland, College Park, and University of Thessaly, Greece.

https://seas.yale.edu/faculty-research/faculty-directory/leandros-tassiulas

Sekhar Tatikonda

Sekhar Tatikonda received his BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Electrical Engineering Department at Yale in 2002.  He works broadly in the areas of communications, networking, and machine learning.  In particular he is interested in issues of coordination, cooperation, computation and learning in distributed and networked systems.  He was awarded the inaugural Ackerman Award for Teaching and Mentoring for having a positive impact on students and contributing to the educational mission of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Yale.

Sekhar is an Associate Professor of Data Science, Statistics & Electrical Engineering and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Statistics and Data Science.

https://www.eng.yale.edu/sekhar/

Peter M. Aronow
Associate Professor of Political Science, of Public Health (Biostatistics), and of Statistics and Data Science
Resident Fellow, Institution for Social and Policy Studies

James Baron
William S. Beinecke Professor of Management
Professor of Sociology
Yale School of Management

Dirk Bergemann
Douglass and Marian Campbell Professor of Economics

Scott Boorman
Professor of Sociology

Xi Chen
Associate Professor of Public Health (Health Policy)
Associate Professor at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies
Affiliated Faculty, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC)
Yale School of Public Health

Ronald Coifman
Professor of Mathematics and of Computer Science, Biological, and Biomedical Sciences

Forrest Crawford
Associate Professor of Public Health (Biostatistics) and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Yale School of Public Health

Florian Ederer
Associate Professor of Economics
Yale School of Management

Emily Erikson
Academic Director of the Fox International Fellowship
Associate Professor of Sociology

Alison Galvani
Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis (CIDMA)
Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases)
Yale School of Medicine

Mark Gerstein
Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics
Departments of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and of Computer Science

Robert Heimer
Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Pharmacology
Former Director, Yale office of the Connecticut Emerging Infections Program
Yale School of Public Health

Edward Kaplan
Professor of Operations Research, of Public Health, and of Engineering
Yale School of Management

Trace Kershaw
Associate Professor of Epidemiology
Yale School of Public Health

Marissa King
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Sociology
Yale School of Management

Balázs Kovács
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior
Yale School of Management

Smita Krishnaswamy
Assistant Professor of Genetics
Yale School of Medicine

Sanjeev Kumar
Lecturer of Public Health (Health Policy & Management)
Yale School of Public Health

Vahideh Manshadi
Assistant Professor of Operations
Yale School of Management

A. Mushfiq Mobarak
Associate Professor of Economics
Yale School of Management

A. Stephen Morse
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Sahand Negahban
Assistant Professor of Statistics

Andrew Papachristos
Associate Professor of Sociology
Faculty fellow at the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course

Richard Prum
William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology
Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

David Rand
Assistant Professor of Psychology

Nicholas Read
Henry Ford II Professor of Physics Professor of Applied Physics and Mathematics

Vladimir Rokhlin
Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics

Mark Saltzman
Chair, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Goizueta Foundation Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology

Larry Samuelson
A. Douglas Melamed Professor of Economics

Laurie Santos
Associate Professor of Psychology

Olav Sorenson
Frederick Frank ‘54 and Mary C. Tanner Professor of Management
Professor of Sociology
Yale School of Management

Stephen Stearns
Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Paul Turner
Chair, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Van Vu
Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Statistics and Data Science

Harrison Zhou
Chair, Department of Statistics

Steven W. Zucker
David and Lucile Packard Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Insu Han

Insu is a Postdoctoral Associate in Electrical Engineering and works in the IID Group with Amin Karbasi. HIs research interests focus on approximate algorithm design and analysis for large-scale machine learning and its applications. He has interned at Google New York and is a recipient of the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship 2019. 

Diego Kiedanski

Diego is a Postdoctoral Associate in Electrical Engineering under Leandros Tassiulas.

Tim Kunisky

Dmitry “Tim” Kunisky is a graduate of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. His research interests include computational “hard regimes” in problems arising in data science and optimization; convex relaxations and their average-case performance on random problems; and random optimization landscapes and the relationship between their high-dimensional geometry and the computational hardness of optimization. Tim is a Postdoctoral Associate in Computer Science, and is hosted by Dan Spielman.

Konstantinos Nikolakakis

As a Postdoctoral Associate with the Department of Electrical Engineering under Leandros Tassiulas, Konstantinos conducts research in the areas of Machine Learning, Statistics, Multi-Armed Bandits, Dynamic Programming, and Information Theory. 

Iason Ofeidis

Iason is a Postgraduate Associate in the Department of Electrical Engineering under Leandros Tassiulas. 

Georgios Palaiokrassas

Postdoctoral Associate Georgios Palaiokrassas works with PI Leandros Tassiluas on research in networking, machine learning, and blockchain. His Ph.D. is from the National Technical University of Athens. 

Nitish Kumar Panigrahy

Nitish Kumar Panigrahy is a Postdoctoral Associate in Electrical Engineering under Leandros Tassiulas. His research interests primarily lie in the area of performance evaluation and optimization of classical and quantum networks, representation learning and network science.

Konstantinos Poularakis

Konstantinos Poularakis is an Associate Research Scientist in the Electrical Engineering department at Yale University. His research interests lie in the area of network optimization and online learning, with emphasis on emerging network architectures including edge networking, software-defined and wireless caching networks. He obtained his Ph.D. in University of Thessaly, Greece, in 2016. In 2014, he was a Research Intern with Technicolor Research, Paris. He was the recipient of several awards and scholarships during his studies, from sources including the Greek State Scholarships foundation, the Center for Research and Technology Hellas, the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and the Bodossaki Foundation. He also received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE INFOCOM 2017 and the IEEE ICC 2019. 

Haoyue Tang

Haoyue Tang is a Postdoctoral Associate under Leandros Tassiulas. 

GRADUATE STUDENTS

Aosong Feng

Aosong is a graudate student in the Department of Engineering & Applied Science under PI Leandros Tassiulas.

Jian Ding

Jian Ding is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science working with Prof. Leandros Tassiulas. Her research interests are in wireless systems, with a focus on the virtualization of 5G massive MIMO system and RF sensing. Her work has received a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at MobiCom 2019.    

Simeng Han

Simeng is a Computer Science graduate student under Drago Radev in the LILY Lab. She has a B.Eng Computer Science degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. 

Bo Hu

Bo is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science, working with Professor Wenjun Hu. His work is centered on distributed systems and mobile computing. Specifically, he is interested in distributed IoT devices system and mobile offloading to make it possible for the computation-intensive workloads running on the mobile devices with limited computation and energy capability.

Jonathan Koss

Jon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering under PI Hemant Tagare. He is at YINS working with machine learning techniques and their applications to Parkinson’s Disease. 

Navin Kumar

Navin is a graduate student in the Sociology Department and works in the Human Nature Lab under Nicholas Christakis. He has over five years of research experience honed in the public and private sectors, aimed at translating data into results that can and have been used by businesses and government. He is especially passionate about using research to help businesses outside the mainstream gain legitimacy. He has collaborated on projects and initiatives in the Cannabis Industry and on Sex Work, Social Networks and Masculinity.

Jane Lee

Jane joined YINS in 2021 as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science under Professor Amin Karbasi.

Irene Li

Irene is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science under Professor Dragomir Radev, working in his Language, Information, and Learning at Yale (LILY) Lab.

Ruichun Ma

Ruichun Ma is a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering working with Professor Wenjun Hu.

Siddharth Mitra

Siddharth Mitra is a student of mathematics and computer science broadly interested in optimization, machine learning, and theoretical computer science. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science under Professor Amin Karbasi.

Akrit Mudvari

Akrit is a graduate student in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Linyong Nan

Linyong is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science working with Prof. Drago Radev. He has a Masters from Columbia University and his research interests include natural language processing, healthcare and biotechnology, and adversarial machine learning, robustness and interpretability of machine learning systems. 

Ansong Ni

Ansong is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department working with Prof. Dragomir Radev in the Language, Information, and Learning at Yale (LILY) Lab. He obtained his M.S. in CS degree from the Carnegie Mellon University, working with Prof. Graham Neubig on semantic parsing. He has also worked on the topic of machine learning for software engineering with Prof. Ming Li in his undergraduate program.

Nick Nordlund

At the Yale Institute for Network Science, Nick has been able to combine his passions for computer architecture and systems science. He is a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering under Professor Leandros Tassiulas and has completed internships with Amazon Operations Research, Huawei, and IBM. 

Nikolaos Papadis

Nikolaos Papadis is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering, working with Professor Leandros Tassiulas. His research focuses on designing and building secure and scalable decentralized ecosystems for the sharing economy. Specifically, he is interested in Blockchain technology, its theory, mathematical modeling, scalability, security, and tradeoffs, as well as in its applications and its potential to enable secure and trustless disintermediated collaboration. He is also studying decentralized digital identity mechanisms as a tool for achieving privacy and data ownership, as well as mathematical models of exchange markets for the sharing economy. He received his 5-year undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece, and his M.Sc. and M.Phil. from Yale. At Yale, he has received several awards and scholarships, including the 2019 IBM Ph.D. Fellowship, the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation Scholarship, and the A.G. Leventis Foundation Scholarship.  

Marco Pirazzini

Marco is a Computer Science graduate student focusing on CS theory. He is interested in the interplay between mathematics and computer science, in particular spectral graph theory and approximation algorithms. He is currently working with Dan Spielman.

Panagiotis Promponas

Panagiotis is a graduate student in the Department of Elecrical Engineering under Leandros Tassiulas. He is interested in research centered around Network Economics, Algorithmic Game Theory and Machine Learning.

Tim G. J. Rudner

Tim is a DPhil candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, advised by Professors Yarin Gal and Yee Whye Teh, and a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Department of Statistics & Data Science, advised by Professor Sekhar Tatikonda. His research interests span Bayesian deep learning, reinforcement learning, and variational inference. Tim holds a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Oxford and an undergraduate degree in mathematics and economics from Yale University. He is also an AI Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a Fellow of the German National Academic Foundation, a Qualcomm Innovation Fellow, and a Rhodes Scholar.

Shivkumar Vishnempet

Shiv is a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering and works in the Human Nature Lab under advisors Nicholas Christakis and Andre Levchenko. He is interested in exploring networks in biological systems. 

Bouri Wang

Bouri is a graduate student in the Computer Science Department under Dragomir Radev.

Yitan Wang

Yitan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics & Data Science and works with Dan Spielman. 

Ivan Zelaya

Ivan is a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering under Professor Wenjun Hu.

Yihan Zhou

Yihan is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science and is advised by Dan Spielman.

Matt Dutkiewicz

Matt started his career at Yale in 2013 as a financial assistant in Facilities-Capital Finance where he assisted with the financial and accounting responsibilities related to the capital projects taking place throughout the university. In January 2015, Matt was promoted to a grant accountant with the Yale Cancer Center at the Yale School of Medicine. He oversaw a wide range of sponsored and non-sponsored awards and assisted with not only the post-award financial operations but also with the maintenance of multiple departmental accounts and pilot projects. Matt graduated Cum Laude with a BS in Business Administration with a concentration in Finance from Bryant University in 2012. He is currently pursuing a Master’s in Business Administration from Southern Connecticut State University. Outside of work and school, Matt enjoys running, biking, hiking, and exploring the outdoors with his Dachshund, Tanner.

Wyatt Israel

Wyatt Israel is a web developer within the Human Nature Lab. He is primarily focused on developing and supporting the two software packages developed in the lab, Breadboard and Trellis. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Colorado and worked as a web developer at Dish Network before joining the HNL team. In his free time, Wyatt enjoys hiking, reading and playing music.

Mark McKnight

Mark McKnight is a Java developer and web application programmer working with Dr. Christakis on online platforms for social science research.  Although currently living in Hamden, Mark is Boston born and raised and is happiest spending his free time with his wife and two sons watching the Red Sox.

Petergaye Murray

Petergaye is a Research Coordinator in the Human Nature Lab. 

Rennie Negron

Rennie received her BS in Health Services Administration from the University of Central Arkansas and her Master’s in Public Health (MPH) from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.  Prior to coming to Yale, she worked as a project manager at Mount Sinai on various NIH-funded research studies testing interventions to improve health outcomes and reduce disparities in underserved New York City communities. She is originally from Honduras and will be working at YINS as the Program Manager for the Honduras Network project. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking and spending time outdoors or the zoo with her husband and 2 yr daughter.

Liza Nicoll

Liza Nicoll is a Data Scientist for the Human Nature Lab in the Yale Institute for Network Science where she provides data visualization, management, and analysis for multiple research projects, as well as programming support and education for lab members. She has a Biology degree from the University of Massachusetts and a continued education in biostatistics, public health, ecology and data science. She enjoys creative problem solving and programming, especially for the applied challenges of an active, transdisciplinary lab.

William Oles

William is the Research Coordinator for the Human Nature Lab. He is interested in the intersection between public health and social networks, with a particular focus on how our social lives may mediate mental health and happiness. In the lab, he is involved in projects related to social interventions for recovering opiate addicts in New Haven as well as characterizing cooperation within rural communities in Honduras. 

Mandy Singer

Mandy Singer is the administrative assistant for the Yale Institute for Network Science, where she provides support to the faculty and graduate students. 

Maria Vassimon de Assis

Maria is the Assistant Program Manager for the Honduras Project in the Human Nature Lab.

VISITING FELLOWS

PAST MEMBERS & VISITORS

Paul Datta
Technologist, Tata Consultancy Services

Paul is a Technical Architect from Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and was stationed at YINS as a Tata Scholar/Visiting Fellow as part of the Tata-Yale Alliance. He dove into all of the research that happens within YINS and help Nicholas and the team run experiments on Enterprise Social Networks. His goal was to see how Network Science can be leveraged to enhance the effectiveness of change management and awareness interventions in the area of Enterprise Security.

Soheil Eshghi

Alexander Fabbri

Alexander completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science under Professor Dragomir Radev. While at YINS, he focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP), in particular subproblems of text summarization such as multidocument summarization, summarization evaluation and summarization in low-resource settings.

Chris Harshaw

Christopher Harshaw successfully defended his Ph.D. in 2021. He was advised by Professors Daniel Spielman and Amin Karbasi. Christopher is interested in spectral graph theory, combinatorial optimization, and applications to machine learning. He earned a B.A. in Computational and Applied Mathematics and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rice University. In his free time, he enjoys composing and playing jazz music, solving puzzles, and visiting the many restaurants in New Haven.

Alexander Isakov
Finance Executive

Alexander’s work in the Human Nature Lab centered on collective problems: how do groups solve the collective action problem to create violent raids, can we control network effects through targeted interventions, and how does behavior work on networks with negative ties?

Ehsan Kazemi
Research Software Engineer, Google Zurich

Ehsan Kazemi was a postdoctoral research fellow at YINS. He worked with Profs. Amin Karbasi, Forrest Crawford and Daniel Spielman. Ehsan completed his PhD. at LCA4, EPF Lausanne under the supervision of Prof. Matthias Grossglauser. His doctoral thesis was titled, “Network Alignment: Theory,  Algorithms, and Applications”. He received both his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Communication Systems from Sharif University of Technology. His main interests are data mining, algorithms, analysis of complex networks and application of graph analysis tools in different fields such as social networks and biology. He has the experience of working with real and large datasets such as Orange D4D and NOKIA MDC. He won the NOKIA Mobile Data Challenge (MDC) on the Next Place Prediction with the best predictor. He is the recipient of Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

Mehraveh Salehi

Mehraveh Salehi completed her time at Yale with her Ph.D. thesis entitled “Individualized and Task-Specific Human Brain Mapping.” Working with Professor Todd Constable and Professor Amin Karbasi, Mehraveh was interested in combinatorial optimization and machine learning algorithms with a focus on submodularity and its applications in the human brain. Her research was aimed at developing predictive models that relate human behavior to individual brain functional connectivity patterns as measured by fMRI. Mehraveh earned her B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. In her free times, she is interested in playing Santour (a Persian music instrument), watching movies, and running.

Malgorzata (Maggie) Zalewska

Maggie is the Senior Administrative Assistant to Nicholas Christakis and the Human Nature Lab. She is an Executive Professional with over 15 years experience of successfully managing administrative operations to achieve and exceed goals.