Open Positions: Postdoc and Research Technician
Are you interested in working at the intersection of decision and affective neuroscience?
Do you want to build and apply computational models of learning, decision making, or emotions? We are looking for you!
We are pleased to accept postdoc and research technician applications (start date flexible) in the Department of Psychology at Yale. Applicants should be interested in contributing to the fields of computational psychiatry and/or neuroeconomics. Postdoctoral applicants should have experience with computational modeling typically demonstrated with at least one first-author publication using those methods. Research technician applicants should have programming experience.
To apply, send a cover letter and CV to robb.rutledge@yale.edu
Review of applications will continue until the positions have been filled.
We build computational models of decision making to explain variability in decision making including in relation to affective experience. We use neuroimaging, pharmacology, and smartphone-based data collection to build new models for mood and behavior. We are currently collecting neuroimaging and smartphone task data from 250 people with a history of major depression. Can we predict how symptoms will change over months in samples of hundreds of people with depression or anxiety? How do those changes relate to the structure and connectivity of the brain? How does behavior changes over months or even years? We are also interested in how language relates to mental health and well-being, and also how dyslexia is related to anxiety and depression.
Much of our research uses large datasets acquired using our smartphone platforms including The Happiness Project which has had over 15,000 downloads. Data from 47,067 participants playing a risky decision making and happiness task in our previous app is freely available on Dryad. Let us know if you discover anything interesting! A few of our collaborators include Conor Liston and Faith Gunning (Cornell Weill), Chris Lambert and Liam Mason (UCL), Molly Crockett (Princeton), and Zeb Kurth-Nelson (DeepMind).
Relevant papers
Heffner J, et al. (2025) Increasing happiness through conversations with artificial intelligence. ArXiv. [Abstract]
Hur JK, Heffner J, Feng GW, Joormann J, Rutledge RB (2024) Language sentiment predicts changes in depressive symptoms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 121, e2321321121. [Abstract] [PDF]
Feng G, Rutledge RB (2024) Surprising sounds bias risky decision making. Nature Communications 15, 8027. [Abstract] [PDF] [PsyArXiv]
Allen KR, et al. (2024) Using games to understand the mind. Nature Human Behaviour 8, 1035-1043. [Abstract] [PDF] [PsyArXiv]
Jangraw D, et al. (2023) A highly replicable decline in mood during rest and simple tasks. Nature Human Behaviour 7, 596-610. [Abstract] [PDF] [PsyArXiv]
Kao CH, Feng GW, Hur JK, Jarvis H, Rutledge RB (2022) Computational models of subjective feelings in psychiatry. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 105008. [Abstract] [PDF] [PsyArXiv]
Gillan CM, Rutledge RB (2021) Smartphones and the neuroscience of mental health. Annual Review of Neuroscience 44, 129-151. [Abstract] [PDF]
Chew B*, Blain B*, Dolan RJ, Rutledge RB (2021) A neurocomputational model for intrinsic reward. Journal of Neuroscience 41, 8963-8971. [Abstract] [PDF] [BioRxiv]
Nair A*, Niyogi RK*, Shang F, Tabrizi SJ, Rees G, Rutledge RB (2021) Opportunity cost determines action initiation latency and predicts apathy. Psychological Medicine, 1-10. [Abstract] [PDF] [PsyArXiv]
Our lab is committed to reproducibility and we strive to incorporate principles of open science in our research, including sharing our data and code. We believe that our science is better with a team with a broad range of backgrounds and experiences.