Postdoctoral Fellow – Computational Affective and Social Cognition Lab Full-time NEW

Postdoctoral Fellow – Computational Affective and Social Cognition Lab

The CASCog Lab, an interdisciplinary lab at the intersection of Psychology and Artificial Intelligence, is housed in the Department of Psychology, in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. In our lab, we are interested in studying how people and machines understand emotions. Recent projects include: how generative AI may be able to provide empathy, how people perceive such artificial empathy, and how this relates to AI sycophancy and mental health. This position is for a fixed-term of one year.

The Computational Affective and Social Cognition Lab (CASCogLab) in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, directed by Professor Desmond Ong, is hiring a full-time Postdoctoral Research Fellow for academic year 2026-27.

The Postdoctoral Fellow will work primarily on an NSF-funded project related to studying how well AI models understand human emotions. The scope includes questions like: how do machines reason about human emotions in context, over time, and appropriately reason over interventions (e.g., emotion regulation). The Postdoctoral Fellow will also be invited to contribute to other ongoing and related projects in the lab: characterizing the advantages and disadvantages of artificial empathy; studying the implications for mental health; studying the implications for development (e.g., adolescents); developing technical solutions for mitigating some harmful AI behaviors (like AI sycophancy); contributing to mental health and other safety-relevant benchmarks; policy-relevant activities.

The Postdoctoral Research Fellows will work closely with the Principal Investigator, Prof. Ong, on all stages of the research process: from conducting literature reviews, designing and running empirical studies including both experiments with humans as well as with machines (via simulations etc), to data analysis and computational modeling of the data, to writing up the results for publication and presentation. The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will propose and lead research projects of their own under the supervision of the Principal Investigator. Finally, the postdoctoral research fellows will contribute to grant writing and aspects of grant management as part of their training.

Leading research projects and handling all aspects of the research process, including: handling ethics review and compliance; recruiting participants for empirical studies; designing and implementing simulation studies involving AI models; managing and analyzing data; managing code bases; and supervising undergraduate research assistants

Writing up research into manuscripts, and presenting research at conferences.

Grantsmanship, including applying for training fellowships or assisting with larger grant applications.

Other duties as assigned.

Ph.D. in Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, or a related field received no more than three years prior to the start date. Substantial research experience and research-relevant skills, including:

Experience conducting psychological experiments: designing and constructing experiments, recruiting and consenting participants, and collecting data.

Statistical skills, including data analysis and visualization.

Familiarity with programming, including programming skills in R and/or Python.

Experience with or willingness to learn using LLMs for psychological research.

Experience with or willingness to learn open science practices in psychology (e.g.,version control on Github, reproducible analysis reports in RMarkdown, pre-registration).

Demonstrated self-motivation, accountability, detail-oriented, excellent time management skills.

Clear communication skills and ability to work in a team.

Positive and enthusiastic attitude towards learning

$70,000

A Cover Letter (not more than 3 pages) stating your research interests and long-term goals. Please also discuss how your research interests, prior research experience, and statistical and computational skills, aligns with that of the lab.

A Curriculum Vitae

Up to 2 representative publications

The names, affiliations, and contact information of three individuals who will be willing to provide a recommendation letter describing your research experience and character.