Allegrante, John P. (jpa1)

John Allegrante, the senior Professor of Health Education at Teachers College, the graduate school of education, health and psychology at Columbia University, is the 2017 recipient of the CDC Foundation Elizabeth Fries Prize Award in Health Education for his contributions to the fields of behavioral science and health education as a researcher, academician, and ambassador. He has been a member of the faculty since 1979 and has served as Chairman of the Department of Health and Behavior Studies, Deputy Provost of the College, and Associate Vice President for International Affairs. He holds joint appointments in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia, and is an affiliate of the Columbia Center for Injury Science and Prevention.

Professor Allegrante has had over 25 years of continuous research funding from the National Institutes of Health – procured and conducted in collaboration with physician scientists at Columbia, Weill Cornell Medicine, and New York University – to investigate new approaches to understanding, predicting, and intervening on the barriers and facilitators of behavioral self-management of chronic diseases. His scholarship has illuminated a transdisciplinary understanding of adherence as well as enhanced behavioral intervention approaches that have informed evidence-based clinical practice. This work has contributed to improved behavioral self-management and health outcomes in the context of patient-centered managed care.

A Past President and Distinguished Fellow of the Society for Public Health Education, he was instrumental in organizing the Coalition of National Health Education Organizations to launch the first annual National Health Education Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC, which has focused for over 20 years on advocacy capacity-building and supporting budget appropriations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Professor Allegrante has also written extensively about epistemological, theoretical, and methodological issues, as well as research-to-practice translation, in the science of health promotion, and has been in the vanguard of innovation in professional preparation and workforce development in public health education. He played a pivotal role in leading efforts to establish a unified system of accreditation for professional preparation programs in the United States and to develop consensus on domains of core competencies, standards, and quality assurance in global health promotion that have been codified in the guidelines and criteria of the Council on Education for Public Health and provide a basis for the European Health Education Accreditation System.

With the support of awards from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Allegrante collaborated as a Fulbright Specialist in Public/Global Health from 2005 to 2010 and as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in 2007 with Icelandic behavioral and social scientists to develop a now ongoing program of multidisciplinary research currently funded by grants from the European Research Council and Icelandic Research Fund that is investigating risks and protective factors, including the impact of COVID-19, in a life course study of child and adolescent development. A former Fulbright Ambassador and Fulbright Campus Representative, Professor Allegrante is a member of the Council for European Studies at Columbia University and continues to promote exchanges of scientists, scholars, and students from Iceland and other countries with Columbia and other American universities.

Allegrante initiated the Galway Consensus Conference on International Collaboration on Credentialing in Health Promotion and Health Education, co-chairing its work from 2008 to 2010. He became an International Scholar in the Soros Open Society Foundations Academic Fellowship Program and member of the International Higher Education Support Program in Central Asia that assisted the Kazakhstan School of Public Health with curriculum and faculty development, capacity-building, and mentoring of junior scholars from 2009 to 2013. The Europubhealth Programme named him an Erasmus Mundus Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Santé Publique (EHESP), Rennes and Paris, France, where he taught during the summers of 2013 and 2014. He is the co-founder of the Anxiety Culture Project and is currently leading with colleagues at Kiel University a broad range of scholars at Columbia, Kiel and other European institutions on a collaborative international research effort that is bringing global scholars in the humanities, sciences, and the behavioral and social sciences together to study how cultural anxiety can be better understood in the context of the pressing planetary challenges of climate change, migration, population health, and technology.

Allegrante is an elected Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. He is a member and the vice-chair of the Board of Directors of One To World and served two terms on the Board of Scientific Counselors, a federal advisory committee that advises the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A former Editor-in-Chief of Health Education & Behavior, the flagship research journal of the Society for Public Health Education, he is the founder and co-chair of the Digital Health Promotion Executive Leadership Summit, which has brought together in Washington, DC, and virtually, leading thinkers in the global digital world from the academic, industry, and government sectors to explore how social media and emerging communication technologies can be utilized more effectively to promote population health.

Allegrante is from Salt Point, a Dutchess County hamlet in the New York State Hudson Valley. He received his bachelor's degree with honors from the State University of New York at Cortland in 1974. He earned the M.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1976 and Ph.D. in 1979. He was a W. K. Kellogg Foundation National Fellow from 1985 to 1988 and a postdoctoral Pew Policy Career Development Fellow at the RAND/UCLA Center for Health Policy Study from 1987 to 1988.

Among the numerous honors and awards he has received, Allegrante holds an honorary doctorate in humane letters from the State University of New York.

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