ERC-funded research assistant position in computational psychiatry (TRAD-PSR-2025-10)

Description

Note: This page is for informative purposes only. The official call (particularly, the legal requirements for candidates) and all information related to the selection process (admission, short list, final result) is published in the Department’s website.

The position

Our lab (GraC) is unfolding a research scheme in the frame of the grant ‘The delta of language’ (DELTA-LANG, ERC Synergy), which aims to map fluctuating brain states in psychosis onto changing linguistic patterns in spontaneous speech. We are looking for a highly motivated research assistant who will assist in collecting and preprocessing patient data, as well as in running computational linguistic analyses, particularly at a semantic level of language. The successful candidate will also be enabled to pursue an individual and independent project, and have the possibility to enroll in our PhD program.

Tasks:

• Assist in local data collections in collaboration with clinical teams in local hospitals.
• Assist in the analysis of speech data from patients with mental disorders (especially psychosis) using NLP and neural language models, across multiple languages. 
• General research support in the frame of the project.
• Co-organizing the work of the DELTA-team on a day-to-day level.
• Liaising with other groups and members of the DELTA consortium.
• Contribution to publications and communications.

Qualifications

• MA in psychology, linguistics, data science, cognitive neuroscience, or another relevant field, which must be in hand by July 2025.
• Knowledge and experience in one or more of the following fields:
  • Clinical psychiatry
  • Natural language processing (NLP)
  • Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Computational semantics
  • Theoretical linguistics
  • Programming in Python or another relevant language
  • Knowledge of statistics and relevant packages
• Excellent team worker.
• Keen research interests in both language and psychiatry.
• Interests in highly interdisciplinary research and independent mindset. 
• Interest and experience in neuroimaging data analysis (fMRI) is valued.

Selection criteria:

• Letter of motivation (40 points)
• CV (30 points)
• Interview (30 points)

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

UPF promotes a diverse and inclusive environment and welcomes applicants regardless of age, disability, gender, nationality, race, religion or sexual orientation.