Academics

John Allegrante is the senior professor of health education and deputy provost of Teachers College, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1979 and served as chair of the Department of Health and Behavior Studies. He holds joint appointments in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, and is adjunct professor of behavioral science in medicine in the Division of Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluative Sciences Research at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

Allegrante has had over two decades of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other sources to support research on health behavior and health outcomes in chronic disease. He is currently the lead health education scientist on several funded NIH projects that involve testing novel approaches to improve disease self-management skills among people with chronic cardiopulmonary diseases who are at high risk for adverse health outcomes.

Professor Allegrante has produced an extensive bibliography of published work in health education and health promotion and in clinical epidemiology and health services research. He has been a contributing author to Health is Academic: A Guide to Coordinated School Health Programs (Teachers College Press, 1998), Critical Issues in Global Health (Jossey-Bass, 2001), and Injury and Violence Prevention: Behavioral Science Theories, Methods, and Applications (Jossey-Bass, 2006). In addition, he is the principal editor of the anthology, Derryberry's Educating for Health: A Foundation for Contemporary Health Education Practice (Jossey-Bass, 2004), and co-author of Prentice Hall Health (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007, 2010), a secondary school health textbook that has been widely adopted in American schools.

Allegrante was a W. K. Kellogg Foundation National Fellow from 1985 to 1988 and a Pew Health Policy Fellow at the RAND/UCLA Center for Health Policy Study from 1987 to 1988. A Past President and Distinguished Fellow of the Society for Public Health Education, Allegrante received the Distinguished Career Award in Public Health Education and Health Promotion from the American Public Health Association in 2003. In 2010, he was named the Editor-in-Chief of Health Education & Behavior, the flagship research journal of the Society for Public Health Education.

In 2005, Allegrante was named a Fulbright Specialist in Public/Global Health in Iceland, where he developed a program of collaborative research with Icelandic colleagues on the links between health and academic achievement and threats to child and adolescent health. He returned to Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar in 2007, serving for six months as the Fulbright visiting professor and acting dean of the School of Health and Education at Reykjavik University, where he has been a distinguished visiting professor of public health. He has served as a member of the Advisory Board of Reykjavik University and as a policy advisor to Iceland's Ministry of Health and its Public Health Institute. Professor Allegrante continues to promote exchanges of scientists, scholars, and students from Iceland and other countries with Columbia and other American universities in his role as the Teachers College Fulbright Program Advisor and Campus Representative.

He served as the co-chair of the Galway Consensus Conference on International Collaboration on Credentialing in Health Promotion and Health Education from 2008 to 2010. In 2009, he was named an International Scholar in the Soros Open Society Foundations (formerly Open Society Institute) Academic Fellowship Program and has been a member of the International Higher Education Support Program in Central Asia and Mongolia, where he has been assisting the Kazakhstan School of Public Health and other institutions of higher education in the region with curriculum and faculty development, capacity-building, and mentoring of junior scholars.

Allegrante has been a consultant or advisor to numerous private foundations, universities, and government agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NIH. In addition to being a member of the Society for Public Health Education and the Society of Behavioral Medicine, he is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, an elected member of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, and a Globally Elected Member of the Board of Trustees of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education.