Dr John Coleman

Dr John ColemanDr John Coleman, OBE is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Royal Society of Medicine. 

He is the author of many books, including “The nature of adolescence: 4th Edition (Routledge, 2011), “Why won’t my teenager talk to me?: 2nd Edition” (Routledge, 2018), “The teacher and the teenage brain” (Routledge, 2021), “The psychology of the teenage brain” (Routledge, 2024) and “All about adolescence” (Routledge, In Press, expected 2026).

His career has included a Senior Lectureship at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, and the Directorship of Chalvington, a residential therapeutic community for troubled teenagers. He was for many years the Director of the Trust for the Study of Adolescence (TSA), and he has been a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Education at Oxford University (2006-2015).

His current research interests include the adolescent brain, life skills education, and the impact of the digital world on teenage development. He runs workshops for parents of teenagers, and has been the lead for the Hertfordshire “My Teen Brain” programme.

He has won numerous awards for his work, including the British Psychological Society 1999 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Professional Psychology, and the 2003 European Society for Research on Adolescence (EARA) Lifetime Award. In 2025 he received a Founders Award from the International Association of Adolescent Health (IAAH). This was awarded for his pioneering work in establishing and supporting the Association for Young People’s Health (AYPH) based in London. John is only the second person from the UK to receive the IAAH Founders Award.

Why I study adolescence

Adolescence is without doubt the Cinderella subject within developmental psychology. It gets less attention than other topics in the textbooks, in the curriculum and on the research agenda. So why would someone want to spend their life studying this rather unpopular stage of the life cycle? Colleagues might suggest that the choice has something to do with my own experience of the teenage years.
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Why adolescence matters

In the course of my career many people have asked me why I study adolescence. My own memories of adolescence are not unhappy ones, and I suspect that the reasons I study this topic are more to do with formative experiences in my early twenties than with any unresolved teenage trauma. Two things happened which influenced the direction of my career. 
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