Alexander T. Vazsonyi

Dr. Vazsonyi was recruited to Family Sciences at the University of Kentucky in 2011, following 15 years as a faculty member in Human Development and Family Studies at Auburn University, to hold the John I. and Patricia J. Buster Endowed Professorship in Family Sciences (2011-2019) and to build a research culture. He also accepted appointments as Professor of Psychology (2011) and Professor of Sociology (2016) at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Vazsonyi’s research focuses on child and adolescent development and examines the etiology of child and adolescent adjustment (achievement, health-compromising behaviors, violence, and deviance). He is interested in socialization processes (parenting), but also individual differences (low self-control, sleep), ranging from family contextual experiences to larger cultural processes in understanding variability in adolescent development and adjustment. He has published over 190 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters. He has been identified multiple times as a top 2% percentile rank author in the world based on his research productivity and publication record. 

Dr. Vazsonyi serves as the Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Early Adolescence and as a member of a number of editorial boards (e.g., Journal of Youth and Adolescence; Journal of Criminal Justice). He served and continues to serve on a number of national and international review panels, both for grant reviews as well as professional conferences. He was a Fulbright fellow in 2003 at the University of Maribor in Maribor, Slovenia, the inaugural recipient of the prestigious Fulbright-Masaryk Distinguished Chair in Social Studies in 2010 at the Institute for Research on Children, Youth, and Family in the Psychology Department at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, and the Fulbright-Palacky Distinguished Chair in 2019 in the Psychology Department at Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. 

In addition to classroom teaching, Dr. Vazsonyi identifies mentoring both undergraduate and particularly graduate students as one of the most important and rewarding things he does. In 2018, he received the Teachers Who Made a Difference Award, College of Education, University of Kentucky. Over the past two and a half decades, he has chaired over 25 Ph.D. students, many of which hold postdocs or tenure-track positions at major universities, as well as over a dozen M.S. students. Dr. Vazsonyi also has appointments at the University of Kentucky in Psycholgy (since 2011) and in Sociology (since 2017), and he serves as a Faculty Affiliate in The Quantitative and Psychometric Methods (QPM) program, Department of Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology (EDP), College of Education. He currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) for the department.