John P. Allegrante

In 2005, he was selected to be a Fulbright Specialist in Public/Global Health and later, in 2007, a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Iceland. There, he began a collaboration with Icelandic behavioral and social scientists who are researching the prevalence and prevention of substance use in Iceland and other Nordic and European countries. Allegrante has been collaborating as a senior investigator with a multidisciplinary team of behavioral and social scientists at Reykjavik University, who are studying child and adolescent health in a developmental life course study of the 2004 Icelandic birth cohort. Recent studies by the group, published in The Lancet Psychiatry and the JCCP Advances, have reported on the impact of COVID-19 on adolescent mental health. The research has been supported by grants from the U.S.-Icelandic Fulbright Program, Icelandic Centre for Research and the European Research Council.

He served as 48th President of the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE), 1997–98, and was editor of SOPHE's flagship research journal, Health Education & Behavior, from 2011 to 2018. As President of the National Center for Health Education during 2001–05, which was originally incorporated in New York under the Research Council of the Society for Public Health Education, he later oversaw the merger of the center's programs with SOPHE.

Allegrante is a globalist and has been engaged in several international collaborations that focus on understanding and improving human population health. During the mid-1990s, he led delegations of nursing and public health professionals for Health Volunteers Overseas to Vietnam as part of the Clinton Administration's U.S.-Vietnam reconciliation efforts to build capacity in the country's higher education sector. Later, as an Open Society Foundations International Scholar, he was a faculty member in the higher education support program in Central Asia. He worked with the Kazakhstan School of Public Health to strengthen capacity of junior faculty and has written about the public health policy challenges and priorities for Kazakhstan.

In 1987, during a year long sabbatical leave from Columbia, Allegrante was a Pew Policy Career Development Fellow at the RAND/UCLA Center for Health Policy Study, where he studied with several RAND Health Insurance Experiment investigators. Following RAND, he began a 10-year research appointment as the chief behavioral scientist and educator in the NIH-funded Cornell Multipurpose Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases Center at the Hospital for Special Surgery. His most notable contribution is the study of supervised fitness walking that he, his doctoral student Pamela Kovar and others conducted with funding support of the Arthritis Foundation. The seminal study, a randomized controlled trial of safety and efficacy, showed that fitness walking was a safe and efficacious non-surgical treatment in people with moderate to severe osteoarthritis of the knees. The findings, which were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1992, established the evidence-base for walking and subsequently changed physician practice.

Allegrante became chairman of the Department of Health Education two years after arriving as a junior faculty member at Teachers College and went on to serve as chair of the department and founding director of the Center for Health Promotion throughout the early and mid-1980s. He became director of the larger Division of Health Services, Sciences, and Education in 1989 and served in that position until 1995. He returned to serve as chair of the Department of Health and Behavior Studies from 2007 to 2009 before subsequently serving as Deputy Provost of the college from 2009 to 2013 and as Associate Vice President for International Affairs from 2013 to 2019.

Allegrante was admitted to a post-doctoral U.S. Public Health Service Traineeship at the Harvard School of Public Health following the completion of his doctorate. He was at Harvard about to begin his studies in the summer of 1979 when he was offered an assistant professorship at Teachers College, Columbia University. Forgoing the postdoctoral fellowship, he moved to New York and joined the faculty of the college in September of that year, becoming chairman of the Department of Health Education at the age of 28. He was promoted to associate professor in 1981, earned tenure shortly thereafter, and was subsequently promoted to full professor in 1993. Allegrante was named the inaugural Charles Irwin Lambert Endowed Professor of Health Behavior and Education in 2022. He holds joint faculty appointments in the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Mailman School of Public Health.

Allegrante is married to Andrea Joan (née Samuels) Allegrante. They met as students at Cortland and were married in 1976. They have a son who is married and one grandson.

Following graduation from Cortland, he enrolled for graduate study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was funded as a graduate research and teaching assistant from 1974 to 1979, earning a M.S. degree in health education in 1976 and Ph.D. in health education and sociology in 1979. During his studies, Allegrante's father became seriously ill and the family ordeal of the cost of his father's hospitalization led him to write an essay about the impact of the high costs of medical care that was published on The New York Times Op-Ed page in April 1977. President Jimmy Carter read his essay and invited Allegrante to the White House where he met with Dr. Peter Bourne, then the special assistant to the President for health affairs, to discuss the dilemmas that working Americans face in paying medical bills. Allegrante has written about the experience, noting that it had an indelible impact on him and shaped his research interests in patient education and advocacy efforts for decades to come.

He began his education in a one-room schoolhouse in Salt Point and later attended elementary, middle and high schools in the Hyde Park Central School District, graduating from Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in 1970. A first-generation college student, he initially attended a local community college and then went on to earn a B.S. degree in education with distinction from the State University of New York College at Cortland in 1974.

John Philip Allegrante (born March 8, 1952) is an American applied behavioral scientist and academic. He is the Charles Irwin Lambert Endowed Professor of Health Behavior and Education at Teachers College, the graduate school of education, health, and psychology at Columbia University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1979.