Denise C. Park, Ph.D.
T. Boone Pickens Distinguished Chair in Clinical Brain Science and UT Regents' Research Scholar
Contact:
- Center for BrainHealth
- The University of Texas at Dallas
- 2200 West Mockingbird Lane
- Dallas, Texas 75235
- Phone: 972-883-3245
- Fax: 214-905-3026
- Email: Click Here
Complete Curriculum Vitae
Denise Park received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany in 1977. She is a professor in the UT Dallas Department of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and a faculty member at tbe Center for BrainHealth. Her fields of professional interest are (a) the cognitive neuroscience of aging, (b) memory processes and aging, (c) culture, cognition, and aging, and (d) impact of neurobiological changes on cognition in everyday life.
Denise Park's primary research interest is in understanding the role of age-related changes in memory function at the basic level (through functional neuroimaging techniques and behavioral studies) as well as the implications of these changes for society (in cross-cultural studies and work in medical information processing).
Park's neuroimaging work focuses on mapping the changing neural circuitry associated with encoding and retrieval processes across the lifespan, using the study of picture memory and imagery formation. Park and colleagues address issues of neural plasticity and dedifferentiation of neural function as a function of age across multiple brain sites (primarily dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and ventral-visual cortex).
Park's cross-cultural research studies have focused on the basic cognitive processes that exist between members of Asian and Western cultures and how these differences are magnified or moderated by the aging process. Ongoing studies look at the mechanisms underlying efficient memory function - speed of processing and working memory; the mechanisms underlying cultural differences in memory - field dependence, analytic processing and categorization; memory function, with an emphasis on understanding how different types of cues support memory in one culture but not another.
Park's work on cognitive function in applied settings is focused on developing techniques for remembering that depend on processes that do not decline with age, particularly automatic processes. She and colleagues have demonstrated that that simple intervention techniques that involve imagining future events (such as taking medication) result in significant gains in adherence behaviors for older adults, due to the reliance on a memory system that is subjected to little or no age-related decline.