Faculty & Staff

Courses taught at Auburn University, The University of Arizona, Masaryk University (Czech Republic), and the University of Maribor (Slovenia)

• Adolescence (undergraduate)
• Adolescent and Young Adult Development (undergraduate and graduate levels)
• Advanced Seminar on Adolescent Development: Evolutionary Mechanisms (graduate)
• Advanced Child Development (undergraduate)
• Advanced Seminar in Human Development and Family Studies (undergraduate)
• Biosocial Determinants of Human Behavior (undergraduate)
• Developmental Psychopathology (undergraduate)
• Doctoral Research Methods (graduate)
• Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (graduate)
• Independent Study and Research (undergraduate and graduate levels)
• Lifespan Human Development (undergraduate)
• Practicum in Human Development and Family Studies (undergraduate and graduate levels)
• Program Development and Evaluation (undergraduate)
• Recent Research in HDFS: Behavior Genetics & Sociobiology (undergraduate)
• Teaching Practicum (graduate)
• Theories of Human Development (graduate)
• Theories of Problem Behaviors (undergraduate)

• Adolescent adjustment and well-being
• Development in context (family, school, neighborhood, and culture)
• Etiology of problem behaviors, deviance, violence, and health compromising behaviors

Dr. Vazsonyi joined the faculty in 2011. Before accepting the appointment at the University of Kentucky, he spent 15 years in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Auburn University. His research has and continues to focus on the etiology of child and particularly adolescent problem behaviors, health compromising behaviors, violence, and deviance. He is interested in socialization processes, ranging from family contextual experiences to larger cultural processes in understanding variability in these measures of adolescent adjustment. Following this line of research, he has published over 120 peer reviewed publications, book chapters, conference proceedings, editorials, and technical reports. He also served as one of the Editors of the Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression (2007; see http://uky.academia.edu/AlexanderVazsonyi for more details about his work).

He serves as the Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Early Adolescence (Ranked 23nd of 67 in Developmental Psychology and 4th of 39 in Family Studies; Impact: 2.303[2011]) and is a member of a number of editorial boards (e.g., Journal of Youth and Adolescence; Journal of Marriage and Family). He has served and continues to serve on a number of national and international review panels, both for grant reviews as well as professional conferences. Dr. Vazsonyi was honored by his alma mater in 2008 with the Outstanding Achiever Award in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He was also selected as a Fulbright fellow in 2003 to spend one semester at The University of Maribor in Maribor (Slovenia); in 2010, he was also picked by the 9-member U.S. Presidential Panel as the inaugural recipient of the prestigious Fulbright-Masaryk Distinguished Chair in Social Studies to spend a semester at the Institute for Research on Children, Youth, and Family in the Psychology Department at Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic).

In addition to classroom teaching, Dr. Vazsonyi indentifies mentoring graduate students as one of the most important and rewarding things that he does as a professor. Over the past decade, Dr. Vazsonyi had chaired 8 Ph.D. students at Auburn University, most of which hold tenure-tracks positions at major universities or are a postdoc (e.g., University of Chicago) as well as over a dozen M.S. students.