Biography

John Allegrante, KNFP-06, is the senior Professor of Health Education and Associate Vice President for International Affairs at Teachers College, the graduate and professional school of education and human development of Columbia University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1979 and has served as Chairman of the Department of Health and Behavior Studies and Deputy Provost of the College. As Associate Vice President for International Affairs, he is responsible for directing the College's efforts to advance and support the work of faculty internationally with global partners, including universities, ministries, and NGOs, to build local capacity and to expand professional development, technical assistance, and applied research collaborations in the fields of education, psychology, and health. He holds a joint appointment in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia. Professor Allegrante has had over 25 years of continuous funding from the NIH to develop and evaluate novel behavioral intervention approaches to improve self-management and health outcomes in people with chronic disease. He has produced an extensive bibliography of published papers in health education and health promotion and in clinical epidemiology and health services research, a substantial corpus of which has illuminated a transdisciplinary understanding of how to facilitate adherence to and maintenance of behavioral change in people with chronic diseases. As President of the Society for Public Health Education, he was instrumental in organizing a Coalition of National Health Education Organizations to launch the first National Health Education Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC, in 1999, which now annually focuses on supporting budget appropriations for the CDC. Dr. Allegrante has also been in the vanguard of education and professional preparation issues and workforce development in public health, leading efforts to establish a unified system of accreditation for professional preparation programs in the United States and to develop global consensus on domains of core competencies in global health promotion that are now being implemented across the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. 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 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 and developed a program of collaborative research with Icelandic colleagues on risks and protective factors in child and adolescent health. He returned to Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar in 2007 and is currently a senior collaborating investigator on a life course study of healthy child and adolescent development. 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 and as a recently appointed Fulbright Ambassador. Allegrante 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 Academic Fellowship Program and has been a member of the International Higher Education Support Program in Central Asia, where he has been assisting the Kazakhstan School of Public Health with curriculum and faculty development, capacity-building, and mentoring of junior scholars. The European Public Health Programme named him an Erasmus Mundus Scholar at the Ecole Des Hautes Etudes En Sante Publique (ESEHP School of Public Health), Rennes and Paris, France, where he will be in residence during the summer of 2013 and 2014. 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 Executive Board of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education. In 2013, he was appointed by DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to the Board of Scientific Counselors, a Federal Advisory Committee that advices the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Allegrante received a B.S. with honors from the State University of New York College at Cortland in 1974. He earned a M.S. from the University of Illinois in 1976 and Ph.D. in 1979.