July 8, 2003

BIRMINGHAM, AL — Professor Karlene Ball, Ph.D., is the new director of the Lifespan Developmental Psychology Doctoral program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Ball, who has taught at UAB since 1996, also will continue as director of the Edward R. Roybal Center for Research on Applied Gerontology. She succeeds psychologist Jan Wallander, Ph.D., who has directed the program since 2001.

Ball is an internationally renowned expert on cognitive impairment and aging. For more than 20 years, she has researched the visual and cognitive correlates of mobility problems of older adults, with an emphasis on driving skills. She is associate director of the UAB Center for Aging in the School of Medicine.

She has been a member of several federal advisory committees charged with setting the vision standards for commercial and senior drivers, including the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council. She has also worked as a consultant to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, the Army Research Labs and to several companies that were awarded federal contracts to study the effects of aging on driving.

Ball has received numerous honors during her career, including a Method to Extend Research in Time (M.E.R.I.T.) award from the National Institute on Aging in 1994. In 1996 she was named as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association Division of Applied Experimental Psychology and won a Highway Safety Award from the Nationwide Insurance Company.

Ball earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Indiana University and her master’s and doctoral degrees from Northwestern University. She later completed her post-doctoral work at Northwestern University in 1984.