John B. Jemmott III received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the Harvard University Department of Psychology and Social Relations and was Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a Professor in both the Perelman School of Medicine and the Annenberg School for Communication. For the past 20 years, Professor Jemmott has conducted a program of rigorous research on culturally appropriate HIV/STD risk-reduction interventions for Black adolescents, men, women, and couples, Latino adolescents, South African adolescents, college students, and men, and Batswana adolescents. This work has integrated qualitative research on the target population with the theoretical framework that includes social cognitive theory and the theory of planned behavior to develop interventions that are both culturally appropriate and theoretically grounded. He has published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has served as principal investigator of over $64 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Professor Jemmott has served on several NIH research review committees as well as American Psychological Association (APA) committees, including the APA Minority Fellowship Program Advisory Committee and the Committee on Psychology and AIDS.

A recipient of numerous awards, Professor Jemmott is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Behavioral Medicine and has an endowed chair at the University of Pennsylvania named after the distinguished African American social psychologist, Kenneth B. Clark. Professor Jemmott was identified in the 25 July 2008 issue of Science as a “Top Dog,” 1 of 10 researchers receiving the most investigator-initiated (R01) HIV-research grant funding from NIH in fiscal year 2007. In 2012, Professor Jemmott was 1 of 60 scholars profiled by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, selected from over 46,000 former Fellows, in honor of the 60th anniversary of the program. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have disseminated as effective several curricula based on his HIV prevention research, including “Be Proud! Be Responsible!,” “Making a Difference!,” “Making Proud Choices!,” and “Sister to Sister.” He is currently interested in the effects of perceived norms and social networks, including friendship groups, on health-related behaviors.