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.
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.
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.
Allegrante has served on numerous advisory and review panels of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies and foundations.
He was appointed during the Obama administration to the Board of Scientific Counselors to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, a federal advisory committee that advises CDC.
Later, as an Open Society Foundations International Scholar, he was a faculty member in the higher education support program in Central Asia.
Recent studies by the group, published in The Lancet Psychiatry[20] and the JCCP Advances,[21] have reported on the impact of COVID-19 on adolescent mental health.
Allegrante has taught as a Fulbright visiting professor at Reykjavik University, where he now holds an Honorary Professorship in the Department of Psychology[22] and as an Erasmus Programme visiting professor in the Europubhealth Programme[23] at the École des Hautes Études en Santé Publique (EHESP French School of Public Health) in Rennes and at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick.
[28] Allegrante is the principal editor of the forthcoming book, Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs (Johns Hopkins University Press), which is based on the project.