Mark A. Pachucki

As of  2024, Mark C. Pachucki, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University and the UMass Computational Social Science Institute. Mark is a sociologist whose work seeks to specify how health and health behaviors (such as eating and exercise) and our relationships with others shape one another. To address this, his research focuses on the networks of relationships that organize society and the meanings that individuals attribute to the world around them. Mark received a BA in Sociology from Columbia University and his PhD in Sociology from Harvard University. He is currently appointed as a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar jointly at UCSF Center for Health & Community and UC Berkeley School of Public Health. His research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging, the National Science Foundation, and the Healthy Eating Research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. With the Human Nature Lab, he has investigated social networks and food choice in adults and found that food consumption during later life is far less stable than has been previously documented; that a healthy eating trajectory is beneficial to weight status; and that what a connected peer ate at a prior point in time can predict one’s current eating. His current work is applying novel hardware technologies to discern network interactions in real time.