Professor Aleco Christakis

Alexander (Aleco) Christakis was born in 1937 in Athens, Greece. He went to the United States in 1956 and attended Princeton University with the vision of becoming a theoretical physicist. After completing his Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics at Yale, he returned to Greece and joined the world-class architectural firm of Doxiadis Associates. His responsibility there was to apply rigorous scientific principles borrowed from the physical sciences to developing the science of "human settlements."

Christakis has served on the faculties of Yale University, Georgetown University, University of Athens, and the University of Virginia. He also spent five years at George Mason University as the Director of the Center for Interactive Management.

In 2002, Dr. Christakis served as President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. He also serves as President of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras, a Think Tank dedicated to the practice of Co-Laboratories of Democracy around the world.

In 1989, Christakis founded and became the CEO of CWA Ltd., a consulting firm dedicated to the application of the Interactive Management discipline with governments, businesses and non-profit organizations. The reusability and robustness of this structured dialogue paradigm to interdisciplinary dialogue have been verified in the domains of Environmental and Natural Resource Stewardship; Social, Economic, Educational, Professional, and Cultural Development; Healthcare Systems, Biomedical Research, Development and Regulation; and Technology, Capital, and Knowledge Management.

Christakis has published over 100 papers on the management of complexity in refereed journals. In his work he applies rigorous scientific principles to the study of human organizations and societal systems. He is also the co-author of two books on "Technology Assessment":