Hannah Allen

Executive Director of William Magee Institute for Student Well-being and Assistant Professor of Public Health

Hannah Allen

Dr. Hannah Allen is a researcher, academic, and administrator at the University of Mississippi. She currently serves as the Executive Director of the William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing, where she leads research efforts related to behavioral health among young people. She also serves as a faculty member in the Department of Public Health and helped launch the university's public health undergraduate and graduate programs.

Research Interests

Substance use and addictive behavior among young people, College student health and wellbeing, Epidemiology of mental health across the lifespan, Quantitative methodology and data science in public health, Public health in the Southern U.S.

Biography

Dr. Hannah Allen is the Executive Director of the William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing and a faculty member in the Department of Public Health. Dr. Allen joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi in 2020 to help launch the university’s undergraduate and graduate programs in public health, and she has served as an administrator at the Magee Institute since 2024. In her role at the Magee Institute, Dr. Allen leads research efforts related to the impact of mental health and substance use on student functioning. The institute is focused on using research to inform programming to improve wellbeing among youth and young people, with an emphasis on translating research into policy and practice. Dr. Allen’s individual research focuses on addictive behaviors including alcohol use, drug use, and gambling during adolescence and young adulthood. She is particularly interested in how these behaviors change across the lifespan and how data science can be leveraged to better understand the complex nature of addiction. Dr. Allen’s research is concentrated in Mississippi and the Southern U.S. Before joining Ole Miss, Dr. Allen earned her PhD in Behavioral and Community Health from the University of Maryland and completed a postdoctoral fellowship through the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) focusing on quantitative methodology in prevention science. She also holds a Master of Health Science in Mental Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Allen is originally from Philadelphia, PA and currently lives in Oxford, MS with her family.

 

Education

B.A. Mathematics, Lehigh University (2010)

M.S. Education, Cuny Hunter College (2012)

MHS Health Science, Johns Hopkins University (2014)

Ph.D. Public Health, University of Maryland-College Park (2018)