Dr. Paulson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Director of the OLDeR Lab at the University of Central Florida. As a clinical geropsychologist, he is interested in the pursuit of wellness in later life for older individuals and their surrounding social network, and seeks to maintain an interdisciplinary approach to conceptualizing problems and cultivating interventions. Within recent years, he has shifted from caregiver intervention work back to a primary focus on mental and physical health and wellbeing among older individuals. He is interested in the rapidly evolving scientific literature investigating how substance use in later life influences functional ability, mood, and downstream substance use problems.
His primary research focus currently involves the use of medical cannabis among older adults. He aims to investigate for whom medical cannabis is most useful, in what situations, and under what circumstances. Current and future projects use an ecological momentary assessment based approach to understanding patterns of medical cannabis use, motivations for use, subsequent wellness correlates, and use of protective behavioral strategies, with a goal of ultimately cultivating interventions aimed and maximizing benefits and minimizing iatrogenic effects of medical cannabis use among older individuals seeking this treatment.
He completed his Bachelor’s degree in psychology at Virginia Tech in 2002, Master’s degree in Psychological Sciences from James Madison University in 2005, and PhD in Clinical Psychology at Wayne State University. He went on to complete the Charleston Consortium Internship Training Program in South Carolina before moving to Orlando in 2013. At UCF, Dr. Paulson teaches graduate coursework in the APA-Accredited Clinical Psychology PhD program, and is developing interdisciplinary collaborations for both research and clinical practice. He is currently an advisor with Orlando’s Alzheimer’s and Dementia Resources Center. He is a founding member of the Disability, Aging, and Technology faculty cluster at UCF, and he is a member of the Substance Use Research Group within the psychology department.