Allegrante has made extensive contributions to the literature on health promotion and to the fields of clinical epidemiology and health services research over his 36-year-long career at Teachers College and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia.  Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), his research – conducted in collaboration with physician scientists at Columbia and the Weill Cornell Medical College – has furthered a transdisciplinary understanding of how to facilitate clinically-relevant behavioral self-management of chronic diseases and improved health outcomes. 

Allegrante is also known for improving global professional preparation and workforce development in health education.  He has been a leading figure and architect in the effort 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, standards, and quality assurance in global health promotion.  His efforts are reflected in standards now being implemented across the United States and Europe. 

Allegrante has been a W. K. Kellogg Foundation National Fellow and Pew Health Policy Fellow at the RAND/UCLA Center for Health Policy Study.  He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Society for Public Health Education. His previous honors include the Distinguished Career Award and Mayhew Derryberry Award in Public Health Education and Health Promotion from the American Public Health Association.  He is also an elected fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research and the Society of Behavioral Medicine, as well as a globally elected member of the executive board of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education and a member of the board of directors of One To World. 

Allegrante’s international work – for which he was recognized with an honorary doctorate last year from the State University of New York – has been supported by two Fulbright awards, the Soros Open Society Foundations, and the Erasmus European Public Health Programme.  He currently collaborates with Icelandic behavioral and social scientists on a program of multidisciplinary research supported by a grant from the European Research Council that is investigating risks and protective factors in child and adolescent development. 

Allegrante also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Health Education & Behavior, the flagship research journal of the Society for Public Health Education, and as a member of the federal advisory committee that advises the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The Elizabeth Fries Health Education Award, first presented in 1992, recognizes an individual who has made a substantial contribution to advancing the field of health education or health promotion through research, program development or program delivery.  Among the previous 24 winners of the prize award are Albert Bandura (the renowned professor of psychology at Stanford), Pekka Puska (long-time director general of the National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland), and Barbara Rimer (former director of the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute).   

Allegrante will receive the prize award and present the Elizabeth Fries Health Education Lecture at the 68^th annual meeting of the Society for Public Health Education in Denver, Colorado, on March 31, 2017.

Published Friday, Sep 16, 2016