Spring Lecture

Spring 2025 Public Lecture:

Declining Financial Capacity in Cognitive Aging and Dementia

Financial capacity is a functional ability critical to independence in everyday life. Due primarily to cognitive aging and dementia, older adults experience declining financial skills that place them at risk for poor financial decisions and exploitation by others. These events can have tragic and devastating consequences for older persons and their families. This public lecture highlights the risks to financial capacity that occur in later life and discusses possible early warning signs of decline that can alert older persons and their family members to take needed protective steps. Attendees will depart with an appreciation of the importance of financial capacity in the elderly, and of ongoing scientific and policy work in this area.

Speaker:
Daniel Marson, JD, PhD
The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Wednesday, April 16, 2025
4:30 PM – 7:00 PM CST

Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center

Reception 4:30 – 5:00 PM

Lecture 5:00 – 5:50 PM

Q&A 5:50 – 6:15 PM

Poster exhibit 6:15 – 7 PM

About the speaker:

Daniel Marson, JD, PhD is a clinical neuropsychologist, licensed attorney, and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He directed the Department’s Division of Neuropsychology from 1995 to 2016 and the UAB Alzheimer’s Disease Center from 2005 to 2015. Dr. Marson graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota (1976), and earned his JD at the University of Chicago Law School (1981) and his PhD in clinical psychology (specializations in geropsychology and neuropsychology) at Northwestern University Medical School (1990). Dr. Marson has lectured nationally regarding competency and other medical-legal and ethical issues in dementia and other neurocognitive disorders. He has published over 100 papers, handbooks, and book chapters on these topics. He has been principal investigator on multiple National Institute of Health (NIH) funded studies of decisional and functional capacity in Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, and traumatic brain injury. His work on financial capacity in older adults has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, BBC, Kiplinger Report, and NPR. At the national level, Dr. Marson is the past president and a fellow of the National Academy of Neuropsychology (NAN). He is a member and former chair of the Internal Ethics Committee of the Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study, an NIH funded clinical trials group. He has served as a chartered reviewer at the NIH Center for Scientific Review. Dr. Marson previously served on the Committee on Human Research of the American Psychological Association and chaired the committee in 2012. Dr. Marson often testifies as an expert witness in civil and criminal forensic matters. On a personal note, Dr. Marson has played the diatonic harmonica for many years and is a lover of blues and jazz. He has published in the jazz magazine Downbeat.

The annual Spring Lecture is hosted in partnership with the Texas Instruments Alumni Association and made possible by the Jean & Bill Booziotis Distinguished Lecture funds.