Are you interested in working at the intersection of decision and affective neuroscience?
Do you want to build computational models of learning, decision making, and emotions? We are looking for you!
We are pleased to accept PhD applications to start in Fall 2026 in the Department of Psychology at Yale. The application deadline is December 1.
What is happiness? We are interested in describing the factors that determine subjective affective states like happiness. We build computational models that link affective states to ongoing experience (e.g., rewards, expectations, effort, uncertainty, agency, language) and quantitatively relate feelings and behavior. We use neuroimaging, pharmacology, and smartphone-based data collection to study build new models for mood and behavior. Through ongoing collaborations, we are evaluating individuals with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. We are also collecting data in other samples including Parkinson’s disease where depressive symptoms are common.
We are particularly interested in students enthusiastic about the following research directions:
Computational models of happiness: What are the factors the determine how conscious affective experience changes from moment to moment? How does how we feel influence what we do? What are the neural circuits that underlie those influences? How does affective experience change during interactions with artificial intelligence?
Neuromodulatory influences on reinforcement learning and decision making: How do neuromodulators like dopamine and serotonin contribute to what we do and feel?
Longitudinal smartphone-based data collection in mood disorders and in the general population: 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?
Yale is an ideal environment for studying these kinds of questions. Many of the faculty in the psychology department have overlapping interests and an interest in decision making, emotions, and mood disorders. Just a few of the faculty working on closely related problems include Sam McDougle, Maria Gendron, Wendy Berry Mendes, Jutta Joormann, Dylan Gee, Steve Chang, Shirley Wang, and Laurie Santos. Other colleagues working on related topics in the psychiatry department include Ifat Levy, Phil Corlett, and John Krystal.
Our department is exceptionally well equipped for training the next generation of scholars who want to apply cutting-edge methods to the study of human behavior. There is a research-dedicated neuroimaging center. Graduate course offerings include computational modeling of human behavior, advanced neuroimaging methods, and statistics with fully reproducible data analysis in R. 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 diverse team. We embrace and encourage our lab members’ differences in age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other characteristics that make our lab members who they are.
In general, Dr. Rutledge will be unable to meet with prospective students until after all applications have been submitted and evaluated. If you are interested in working with Dr. Rutledge as your primary advisor, please be sure to make that clear in your application, and also list any other faculty you would be interested in collaborating with. Dr. Rutledge is also available as a potential secondary supervisor. We prefer to admit students whose interests fit with at least two faculty in our department. The Rutledge Lab will accept students primarily through the Cognitive and Neuroscience areas. If you anticipate using neuroscience methods in your research, you should apply through the Neuroscience area.
Admission to our program is highly competitive, and this means that regardless of how well you fit the program, nothing can be guaranteed and you are encouraged to apply to more than one school.
If the application fees are prohibitive, know that it is often possible to get a fee waiver. This can take a couple of days and is completely independent of the rest of the application process. Faculty will not know if you applied for a waiver.
You can maximize your chances by writing an outstanding research statement. We will be looking for evidence that you have read some of our work and have thought deeply about how your interests fit with our research program and that of other faculty at Yale.
Please also be sure to emphasize your technical abilities and experience in your application, including experience with computer programming and data analysis in scientific computing languages (e.g., Matlab, R, Python, HTML/CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, etc.). A lot of what we do is to use math to solve puzzles, so any relevant experience will help your application, including anything that demonstrates your mathematical abilities (there are many ways to demonstrate quantitative abilities and test scores and grades are just one of many ways).
Yale has a very generous funding package for PhD students. However, we encourage all applicants to consider applying for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the NDSEG Graduate Fellowship. Please mention in your application if you have applied for any funding.
(With thanks to Molly Crockett, Jay Van Bavel, and Emily Falk.)