Madden Family Graduate Scholarship in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging
David and Lois Madden established the Madden Family Graduate Scholarship in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging to promote research on the brain and cognitive aging at UVic and to recognize Dave’s parents for their commitment to the education of their children.
Dave completed his BA in psychology at the University of California at Davis in 1972 and then began his graduate studies in the Department of Psychology at UVic. While at UVic, Dave held a University of Victoria graduate fellowship and worked with Drs. Frank Spellacy and Otfried Spreen in the neuropsychology program. Dave completed his MA in psychology at UVic in 1974 and returned to U.C. Davis, where he obtained his PhD in experimental psychology in 1977. From 1977 to 1980 he was a National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellow at the Duke University School of Medicine, in Durham, North Carolina, working with Dr. Robert Nebes on studies of age-related differences in cognitive function, combining behavioral measures from neuropsychology and experimental psychology. Dave joined the Duke medical school faculty following his fellowship, developing an interdisciplinary research program including colleagues across the university and Health System. He was promoted to Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in 1998.
Dave’s research program has focused on the cognitive neuroscience of aging, combining behavioral measures of age-related changes in perception, attention, and memory with measures of brain structure and function obtained from neuroimaging of healthy adults. This research represented some of the first studies of brain activation conducted at Duke, in the 1990s, using positron emission tomography (PET). More recently this work has used different forms of structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, including task-related and resting-state functional MRI, and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) analyses of structural MRI data. This research program has been funded by NIH since 1980, and Dave has co-authored nearly 200 scientific publications over the course of his career. His students and postdoctoral fellows have gone on to senior research and academic positions, including a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Aging. Dave was the recipient of an NIH MERIT Award in 1997, and the Baltes Distinguished Research Achievement Award, from the American Psychological Association, in 2004. He has served on numerous journal editorial boards and grant review panels, and in 2023 was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the journal Neurobiology of Aging. In 2024 he was the recipient of the Career Mentoring Award in Basic and Translational Science, from the Duke University School of Medicine.
This scholarship represents a significant investment in UVic talent that will help propel innovative research in healthy cognitive aging. Scholarship support will inspire graduate students at UVic with the financial and motivational support to explore their boldest ideas and contribute to better brain health for all.