Office Location:
530-I Building 528TC Affiliations:
Faculty Expertise:
Educational Background
B.S., State University of New York, Cortland; M.S., Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Postdoctoral Fellowship, RAND/UCLA Center for Health Policy
Scholarly Interests
Behavioral self-management and health outcomes in chronic disease. Health education in schools and health-care settings. Health promotion policy. Global health promotion and health education workforce capacity and development. Interdisciplinary applied behavioral research in clinical epidemiology and health services research. Risk and protective factors in adolescent substance use and mental health. Social and cultural anxiety.
Selected Publications
Thorisdottir, I.E., Augustsson, G., Oskarsdottir, S.Y., Kristjansson, A.L., Asgeirsdottir, B.B., Jonsdottir Tolgyes, E.M., Sigfusson, J. Sigfusdottir, I.D., Allegrante, J.P., & Haldorsdottir, T. (2023). The long-term effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on adolescent mental health and substance use in Iceland: A longitudinal, population-based study. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 7(5), 347-357. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(23)00022-6/fulltext
Layman, H.M., Thorisdottir, I.E., Haldorsdottir, T., Sigfusdottir, I.D., Allegrante, J.P., & Kristjansson, A.L. (2022). Substance use among youth during the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review. Current Psychiatry Reports. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-022-01338-z
Albanese, N.N.Y., Lin, I., Friedberg, J.P., Lipsitz, S.R., Rundle, A., Quinn, J.W., Neckerman, K.M, Nicholson, A., Allegrante, J.P., Wyle-Rosett, J., & Natarajan, S. (2022). Association of the built environment and neighborhood resources with obesity-related health behaviors in older veterans with hypertension. Health Psychology. Advance online publication. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-49824-001
Thorisdottir, I.E., Asgeirsdottir, B.B., Kristjansson, A.L., Valdimarsdottir, H.B., Jonsdottir Tolgyes, E.M., Sigfusson, J., Allegrante, J.P., Sigfusdottir, I.D., & Haldorsdottir, T. (2021). Depressive symptoms, mental wellbeing and substance use among adolescents before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iceland: A longitudinal, population-based study. The Lancet Psychiatry, 8(8), 663-672. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(21)00156-5/fulltext
Zhao, M., Rodriguez, M.A., Wang, B., Santa Anna, E.J.,Friedberg, J., Fang, Y., Allegrante, J.P., & Natarajan, S. (2021). Validity and reliability of a short self-efficacy instrument for hypertension treatment adherence among adults with uncontrolled hypertension. Patient Education & Counseling, S0738-3991(20)30693-5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2020.12.029
Green, L.W., & Allegrante, J.P. (2020). Practice-based evidence and the need for more diverse methods and sources in epidemiology, public health and health promotion. American Journal of Health Promotion, 34, 946-948. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0890117120960580b
Allegrante, J.P., Auld, M.E., & Natarajan, S. (2020). Preventing COVID-19 and its sequela: "There is no magic bullet . . . it's just behaviors." American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 59, 288-292. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2020.05.004
Abroms, L.C., Allegrante, J.P., Auld, M.E., Gold, R.S., Riley, W.T., & Smyser, J. (2019). Toward a common agenda for the public and private sectors to advance digital health communication. American Journal of Public Health, 109, 221-223. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2018.304806
Allegrante, J.P., Wells, M.T., & Peterson, J.C. (2019). Interventions to support behavioral self-management of chronic diseases. Annual Review of Public Health, 40, 127-146. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040218-044008
Allegrante, J.P. (2018). Advancing the science of behavioral self-management of chronic disease. The arc of a research trajectory. Health Education & Behavior, 45, 6-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198117749010
Biographical Information
John Allegrante is the inaugural Charles Irwin Lambert Professor of Health Behavior and Education at Teachers College, the graduate school of education, health and psychology at Columbia University. The 2017 recipient of the Fries Foundation and CDC Foundation Elizabeth Fries Health Education Award 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, serving as department chair, deputy provost, and associate vice president for international affairs of the College. He is an at-large member of the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and holds faculty affiliations in the Columbia Center for Injury Science and Prevention and Columbia Scientific Union for the Reduction of Gun Violence.
For over 30 years, Professor Allegrante has conducted research with funding from the National Institutes of Health – procured 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.
With the initial support of awards from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Allegrante began a collaboration with Icelandic behavioral and social scientists as a Fulbright Specialist in Public/Global Health from 2005 to 2010 and as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in 2007. He and his Nordic colleagues have developed 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 for substance use and the impact of COVID-19 on mental health in a life course study of child and adolescent development. A former Fulbright Ambassador and Fulbright Campus Representative, Professor Allegrante continues to promote exchanges of scientists, scholars, and students from Iceland and other countries with Columbia and other American universities.
Allegrante has 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. 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 25 years on advocacy, capacity-building and supporting budget appropriations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As co-chair of the National Task Force on Accreditation in Health Education and the Galway Consensus Conference on International Collaboration on Credentialing in Health Promotion and Health Education, he played pivotal leadership roles to establish a unified system of accreditation for professional preparation programs in the United States that has been codified in the guidelines and criteria of the Council on Education for Public Health and to develop consensus on domains of core competencies, standards, and quality assurance in global health promotion that has informed the European Health Education Accreditation System.
As an International Scholar in the Soros Open Society Foundations Academic Fellowship Program and member of the International Higher Education Support Program in Central Asia, he 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. More recently, he co-founded the Anxiety Culture Project at Kiel University, a collaborative international research effort that has brought together a broad range of global scholars from the humanities, sciences, and the behavioral and social sciences at Columbia, Kiel and other universities to study how cultural anxiety can be understood in the context of the pressing planetary challenges of climate change, migration, population health, and technology. He is the principal editor of the forthcoming book, Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs (Johns Hopkins University Press), an outcome of the project.
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 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, served for seven years as a member and vice-chair of the Board of Directors of One To World, and is an Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Health Education & Behavior, the flagship research journal of the Society for Public Health Education, which he edited from 2011 to 2017.
He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned a bachelor's degree with honors from the State University of New York at Cortland. Allegrante was a W. K. Kellogg Foundation National Fellow and a postdoctoral Pew Policy Career Development Fellow at the RAND/UCLA Center for Health Policy Study.
Among the numerous honors and awards he has received, Allegrante holds an honorary doctorate in humane letters from the State University of New York.
Honors and Awards
Honorary Professor, Reykjavik University, 2022
Erasmus+ Visiting Scholar, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland, 2018
Elizabeth Fries Health Education Award, Fries Foundation and CDC Foundation, 2017
Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Germany, 2016
Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa, State University of New York, 2015
Mayhew Derryberry Award, Public Health Education and Health Promotion Section, American Public Health Association, 2015
Fellow, Society of Behavioral Medicine, 2015
Erasmus Mundus Visiting Professor, Europubhealth Programme, 2013, 2014
Fulbright Ambassador, Council for International Exchange of Scholars, 2012-17
International Scholar, Soros Open Society Foundations, 2009-13
Fulbright U.S. Scholar, 2007-08
Fellow, Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, 2006
Fulbright Specialist in Public/Global Health, 2005-10
SOPHE Trophy for Outstanding and Dedicated Service, Society for Public Health Education, 2005
Distinguished Career Award, Public Health Education and Health Promotion Section, American Public Health Association, 2003
Health Education Mentor Award, Society for Public Health Education, 2002
Distinguished Fellow Award, Society for Public Health Education, 1999
Fellow, New York Academy of Medicine, 1985
Current Research
Anxiety Culture (John P. Allegrante, PhD, and Ulrich Hoinkes, PhD, PIs)
The NIMH estimates that 31 percent of adults will experience an anxiety disorder in their lifetime. We know a lot about the term "anxiety" as a medical idiom at the individual, clinical level. What we do not know much about is what anxiety looks like and what its effects are at cultural and social levels. This interdisciplinary research project brings together a broad range of global scholars in the humanities, sciences, and behavioral and social sciences to understand how cultural anxiety can be understood in the context of the pressing planetary challenges of climate change, population health, migration, and technological change. Thus, the challenge is to recognize the contours of this kind of anxiety as heuristic and the extent to which it is a mixture of both public discourse and social action. The project seeks to develop the conceptual language and middle-range theoretical framework with which to understand anxiety culture.
School Violence Exposure as an Adverse Childhood Experience: A Nationwide Study of K-12 School Responses to Violence and their Impact on Youth Mental Health and Educational Outcomes (Sonali Rajan, EdD, and Charles Branas, PhD, Co-PIs, John P. Allegrante, PhD, Co-I)
Poor mental health and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) predict extensive adverse outcomes in youth, including increases in long-term risk for chronic disease and injury, impaired emotional development, and poor academic outcomes. Exposure to school violence, specifically intentional gun violence, is an increasingly prevalent ACE. Despite this, the association between exposure to existing school safety interventions and early adolescent student mental health outcomes has yet to be investigated. Drawing on a national sample of students, teachers, and principals from twelve K-12 schools with varying degrees of exposure to mass violence, this project seeks to examine if the strength of the association between exposure to school safety interventions and mental health outcomes in particular varies as a function of the burden of trauma experienced within a school. Results will have implications for schools, as they consider the best ways to support the mental health, safety, and learning needs of their school communities.
Active Professional Organizations
Society for Public Health Education
Related Articles
Attachments
This article describes advances in the behavioral self-management of chronic disease from the perspective of a 25-year trajectory of National Institute of Health-funded research in arthritis and cardiopulmonary diseases that has sought to develop a transdisciplinary understanding of how applied behavioral science can be used to improve health behaviors, functional status, and health outcomes. The article concludes with what has been learned and what the implications of the work are for advancing behavioral self-management and patient education.
This review synthesizes the current state of the science of chronic disease self-management interventions and the evidence for their effectiveness, especially when applied with a systematic application of theories or models that account for a wide range of influences on behavior. Our analysis of selected outcomes from randomized controlled trials of chronic disease self-management interventions contained in 10 Cochrane systematic reviews provides additional evidence to demonstrate that self-management can improve quality of life and reduce utilization across several conditions.
This article poses the question of whether the U.S. communication strategy to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus is optimal. It describes three strategic fronts on which the war against the virus must be fought if Americans are to adopt and adhere to the complex and difficult changes in behavior to prevent further spread of COVID-19. These include 1) identifying gaps in what the public understands to optimally target behaviors, 2) utilizing digital technology to efficiently target at-risk individuals and tailor interventions, and 3) advancing pandemic behavioral science—for now and the Future.