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Professor Emeritus
The University of Florida
I am a Board-Certified (ABPP) Clinical Neuropsychologist with nearly 40 years of experience in research, mentorship, graduate education, and program administration. I served as Department Chair (2006-2011), and directed the Department’s Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology for eleven years (until 2019). In my career, I have served on 92 doctoral committees (39 as chair) and 55 master’s committees (29 as chair). I have published widely on topics related to neurocognitive aspects of brain dysfunction. I currently direct the Brain Rehabilitation Research Center at the Malcom Randall VAMC, where my current research projects evaluate structure-function relationships in the aftermath of traumatic brain injury with the goal of developing and improving mechanism-based rehabilitation programs. I recently completed a VA RR&D SPiRE award to develop process-specific memory interventions tailored to individual patterns of disability in Veterans after mild- moderate TBI, and seek to contribute to the development of “personalized rehabilitation” as a science and practice area. This takes place in the context of my broader cross-institutional interest in traumatic brain injury, where my lab is investigating factors that are associated with complicated recovery after TBI. I also have interests in effects of TBI and other risk factors on development of dementia. For the past several years, my laboratory has been collecting preliminary data on the predictive utility of novel comparative neuropsychological measures in detecting preclinical stages of dementia. These measures are described as ‘comparative” in that they are adapted from the preclinical animal literature evaluating memory systems impairment, and include a virtual Morris Water Maze (sensitive to hippocampal dysfunction) and a complex visual discrimination task (sensitive to perirhinal cortex dysfunction) that is currently being evaluated in collaboration with Sara Burke, Ph.D. Previous funding from the Ed and Ethel Moore Alzheimer’s disease research program (in collaboration with David Loewenstein at U Miami) has enabled collection of additional data as well as the ability to correlate findings with structural, chemical, and genetic markers of disease. Most recently, I am serving as MPI in a multicenter NIMH R01 that seeks to apply advanced statistical methods (IRT) to a large (N=10K) database of neuropsychological evaluations with the purpose of developing neuroinformatics integration of neuropsychological data on a broad scale, and to develop adaptive testing paradigms to improve efficiency and relevance of NP evaluations in healthcare settings.