Jan Wallander, Ph.D.

Jan L. Wallander (PhD, Purdue University, 1981) is Professor of Psychological Sciences at University of California, Merced since 2007, with a focus on health psychology, where he also is the Co-Director of both the Center of Excellence on Health Disparities and the Health Sciences Research Institute, and Chair of the Chancellor's Task Force on Community Engaged Scholarship.

He has internationally recognized expertise regarding risk and resilience processes associated with the health, quality of life, and well being of children and adolescents. A good portion of this work has focused on those with pediatric disease or disability, as well as their families, but he is also interested in disparities in these outcomes in the general child population.

His current research involves the Healthy Passages project, which is a longitudinal cohort study tracking influences on health and development in adolescence, by following over 5,000 children from age 10 to 20, and the BRAIN-HIT project, a randomized controlled trial of a home-based developmental stimulation program to prevent neurodevelopmental disability in infants born at risk in developing countries (India, Pakistan, and Zambia).