John P. Allegrante is the senior professor of health education and deputy provost at Teachers College, the graduate and professional school of education and human development of Columbia University, where he holds joint appointments in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Mailman School of Public Health.

Professor Allegrante has had over two decades of continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health that has supported a collaborative program of behavioral research to improve self-management and health outcomes in people with chronic disease.  He has produced an extensive bibliography of published work in health education and health promotion and in clinical epidemiology and health services research.  He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Health Education & Behavior, the flagship research journal of the Society for Public Health Education.

Allegrante has been a W. K. Kellogg Foundation National Fellow and a Pew Health Policy Fellow at the RAND/UCLA Center for Health Policy Study.  A Past President and Distinguished Fellow of the Society for Public Health Education, he received the Distinguished Career Award in Public Health Education and Health Promotion from the American Public Health Association.

In 2005, Allegrante was named a Fulbright Specialist in Public/Global Health and developed a program of collaborative research with Icelandic colleagues on 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.  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.

In 2009, Allegrante 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 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. 

He is a member of the Society of Behavioral Medicine and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.  He also is an elected member of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research and globally elected member of the Board of Trustees of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education.  

Allegrante received a B.S. degree with honors from the State University of New York College at Cortland and earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois.