Soc 190 Syllabus, 2007 (pdf file)
Soc 190 Syllabus, 2008 (pdf file)
OFFICE HOURS
Spring semester:
from 4-7 pm on Wednesdays, in WJH 570. All are welcome— to discuss medicine, public health, social science, career plans, summer jobs, course readings or requirements, and anything else I can be helpful with. Otherwise, I am available by appointment.
I enjoy teaching tremendously, and am deeply committed to helping my students in any way I can, whether discussing health and social science, methodology, or career plans. I am involved in teaching at all levels.
At the undergraduate level, I offer the popular and highly rated Sociology 190: Life and Death in the U.S.A.: Medicine and Disease in Social Context. This course examines the social causes and context of illness, death, and health care in the U.S. today; a syllabus is here. These lectures are podcast and are available at itunes or here. From time to time, undergraduates also get involved in ongoing research projects as Research Assistants.
At the graduate level, I offer a seminar course on Health and Social Structure, sit on dissertation committees (click here for links to current students), and involve graduate students and medical students in ongoing research projects in my lab. My sense is that, at this juncture, there is an important strand of social science research that is becoming large-scale and multi-disciplinary and collaborative. Of course, this is a common model in biology, physics, and other sciences, but it is also increasingly becoming the case in the social sciences. I think that getting involved in such projects offers special opportunities to graduate students. For example, students writing their dissertations while working on such projects derive several benefits: 1) they have the opportunity to be closely mentored by a faculty advisor and to learn both science and tradecraft; 2) they have the opportunity to contribute and influence the direction of the parent project, to feel the excitement of such research, and to continue to tap into it after they graduate, if they wish; and 3) they have the chance to make rapid and sophisticated progress, enabling them to publish papers which enhance their career prospects. Of course, I am also happy to serve as a dissertation advisor for students working on projects that are not part of our research group's efforts.
At the post-doctoral level, I am involved in the RWJ program. I also help direct two Federally funded programs that offer post-doctoral positions, one focused on the global demography of aging and one focused on substantive and methodological topics related to network and neighborhood effects on health (as part of our Program Project grant from NIA on "Networks and Neighborhoods"); both programs post annual announcements about positions that are available. As part of our ongoing research, we also host post-doctoral fellows in my lab (click here for present and past post-docs) Finally, I precept a series of sessions each year teaching academic physicians basic principles of research in medical education, as part of the the Rabkin fellowship program in the Shapiro Institute at the Beth Israel Hospital of Harvard Medical School, and as part of the Harvard Medical School Academy for Teaching and Learning.
Courses Offered This Academic Year
Sociology 190 (Spring 2008)
Life and Death in the U.S.: Medicine and Disease in Social Context
Catalog #0021 2007
Sociology 390 (Full Year)
Workshop on Health and Social Structure
Catalog #6282
© 2008 Nicholas Christakis
