Utaka S. Springer
Student Trainee

Phone: (352) 392-3450
Email: uspringe@phhp.ufl.edu

• Education
• Research Interests
• Student Profile
  

 

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology, Gerontology Certificate, University of Florida, expected May 2009
• M.S., Psychology, University of Florida, May 2005
• B.A., Biology, Harvard University, June 1999

Research Interests

Utaka’ primary research interest is the cognitive and emotional changes associated with movement disorders.  He is working with the Movement Disorders Center at UF to investigate these changes in Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor.  Investigative methods have included neurocognitive testing, psychophysiology, digital facial movement analysis, and transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Student Profile

Utaka graduated cum laude from Harvard University in Cambridge, MA in 1999.  He then spent three years as a software engineer in Durham, NC.  He entered the Clinical and Health Psychology graduate program at UF in 2003 to study with an emphasis in Neuropsychology.  He completed his master’s thesis on psychophysiological correlates of facial expression perception.  He increasingly began collaborating with the UF Movement Disorders Center, and his interest in aging developed after working on several projects on Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor.  He is currently investigating spatial navigation and more elementary visual-perceptual abilities in these two movement disorders.  Aside from research, his graduate education involves ongoing training in neuropsychological assessment and psychotherapy of older adults.  In the summer of 2006, he will travel to Xylocastro, Greece as a fellow of the Vivian-Smith Advanced Studies Institute of the International Neuropsychological Society.  There, his foci of study will be the neuropsychological assessment of the older patient and the association of biomarkers and cognitive function in normal aging and dementing disorders.  Utaka is currently working towards obtaining his Graduate Gerontology Certificate.