HCP has just been awarded a major Research Program Project Grant from the National Institute on Aging, for which Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is principal investigator. The “Networks and Neighborhoods” project will receive more than $11 million over the next five years to study the ways in which social networks and local contexts affect health and health care. The Program Project includes eight research projects, as well as administrative and data support units and a junior scholar development program that will award small grants and bring postdoctoral trainees to HCP.

Christakis will study the spread of health behaviors and other phenomena within social networks, as well as investigate fundamental genetic, mathematical, and sociological properties related to social network formation and evolution. Several other members of the HCP faculty are also involved as project leaders: Elizabeth B. Lamont, MD, MS, will head a project studying geographic effects on the course of cancer in the aged. Bruce E. Landon, MD, MBA, MSc, will lead a project examining the role of informal referral networks of physicians on the provision of health care. A. James O’Malley, PhD, will work on developing novel statistical methods for examining network data. In addition, Thomas G. McGuire, PhD, will head the junior scholar development core, and Alan M. Zaslavsky, PhD, will lead the data and statistics core.