Joseph P. Allen is an American psychologist and academic and the Hugh P. Kelly Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia.[1]
Early life
Allen was born on October 30, 1958, in Washington, DC, and grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
Education
He received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Virginia in May 1980, and then a Ph.D. in Clinical/Community Psychology from Yale University in May 1986. He subsequently worked as a post-doctoral fellow in research at Harvard Medical School from 1986 until 1988.[2]
Achievements and Honors
Allen's work on The Connection Project has been written up in the New York Times[3] and was recently cited by U. S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy as a promising approach to enhancing connection among youth.[4]
Allen has published three books and more than 200 academic articles, which have been cited more than 30,000 times in total.[5] He is a recipient of awards for Lifetime Achievement in Research from both the Society for Research in Adolescence and the Bowlby/Ainsworth Attachment Society, as well as an NIH MERIT award for his research.[6]
Research
His research focuses on the predictors and long-term outcomes of social development processes from adolescence into adulthood and he is currently 25 years into a 30-year study on these topics. He also develops and examines socially-focused interventions for adolescents designed to improve long-term academic and mental health outcomes.[7][8][9][10][11]
Together with Claudia W. Allen, he is the author of Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old..[12] In 2016, he founded The Connection Project, a small group intervention for high school and college students that has been documented to reduce loneliness and depressive symptoms and enhance a sense of belonging.[13][10] The program is now being implemented at the high school level by Wyman of St. Louis,[14] and at the college level at the University of Virginia.[15]
In September 2023, successful replication efforts for The Connection Project were begun at Georgetown University and Virginia Tech University. [16]
^Allen, Joseph P.; Claudia W. Allen (2009). Escaping the endless adolescence: how we can help our teenagers grow up before they grow old. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN978-0-345-50789-1. OCLC290464723.
