Alfgeir Kristjansson, PhD

Dr. Kristjansson is from Iceland in Europe, one of the Nordic countries. He has been at WVU since the summer of 2012. Before coming to WVU he studied in his home country, in the UK at the University of Edinburgh, and at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden where he earned his doctorate in social medicine. He completed a post-doctoral training at Columbia University in New York. Dr. Kristjansson’s main area of expertise is adolescent health behaviors with attention to substance use prevention and community health promotion. Currently, Dr. Kristjansson is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Young Mountaineer Health Study funded by NIAAA where a cohort of middle school children is followed over a three-year period. He is also Core Faculty within the West Virginia Prevention Research Center in the School of Public Health, and is the PI of the Center’s Core Research Project titled The Integrated Community Engagement Collaborative (ICE) which is an implementation of the Icelandic Substance Use Prevention Model in WV.  Dr. Kristjansson has also served as the PI and CI on several federally funded evaluation projects in WV. Finally, Dr. Kristjansson is a Lead Scientist for the Planet Youth initiative, which is an international implementation platform for the Icelandic Prevention Model presently being implemented in parts or in whole in over 25 countries ranging from Europe, to the US, Latin America and in Australia.  Dr. Kristjansson continues to be actively involved in child and youth research with scholars from his home country, Iceland, the UK, Sweden and the US.