2025 Graduate Spotlight: Dana Smith

College Fund alum Dana Smith wants to know if there’s something in us that prepares us to be, in effect, better parents and grandparents as we age. While dementia and Alzheimer's have clearly commanded the public’s attention in recent decades, some people have moved through their parenting years and then into their “sandwich generation” years as they become de facto caregivers throughout their adulthood. Some do it very well. 

What allows for this? Smith wants to know. 

She wants to know so much that she needed just three years to earn her undergraduate degree from USF St. Petersburg, living with her Palm Harbor parents throughout. Now she’s been accepted and is working in Emory University’s psychology PhD program, keeping her research moving forward.  

“I almost regret that I did my USF work in three years, I really wish that I had the fourth year to just enjoy my time there,” Smith said from Atlanta recently. “But I just didn’t have the luxury of spending all that money on the college experience.” 

Actually, she had a great college experience, just not the kind usually associated with the undergraduate years. She established and managed USF’s Human and Applied Cognition and Decision-Making Lab under Dr. Michael Gillespie She was an RA in the Preventing Alzheimer’s with Cognitive Training study, then won the Best of the USF 2024 Undergraduate Research Conference for her presentation entitled “Reflections on Motherhood: A Qualitative Approach.”  She then presented it to the USF Board of Trustees at their quarterly meeting. 

The Judy Genshaft Honors College then sent her to Japan on full scholarship. Grandparents, don’t feel left out! Smith’s honors thesis is entitled “Grandparental Cognition: Grandparenthood as a Means of Social Interaction and its Impact on Subjective and Objective Measures of Cognition: A Mixed Methods Approach.” 

And let’s include the scholarship she won from the Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center for collaborating with researchers on art therapy intervention on student well-being. Remember, three years. Smith said her goal is to have her PhD in hand by 2030. It’s still too soon to predict whether her research will ultimately lead to an academic setting or take her into the private sector. 

Her work is coming especially into focus within the private research world, she said. In her three-year frenzy of undergraduate learning and leadership, did she even notice her College Fund of Pinellas assistance? 

“Your scholarship allowed me more freedom to pursue the things I did as an undergrad without the extra worry of money to cover my expenses,” she said. “My parents were not always in a position to fund some of my expenses, especially car expenses as I was a commuter student.”