The Social Learning and Decisions Lab (https://sldlab.umd.edu/, PI: Caroline Charpentier) at the University of Maryland, College Park, is seeking applications for a full-time project coordinator/research assistant (formal title: Faculty Specialist) to start in August or September 2025.
Current research in the lab focuses on uncovering the behavioral and neural computations involved in human social and affective decision-making, with a strong interest in how individual variability in these processes relate to neurodiversity and psychopathology.
This is an excellent opportunity to gain research experience in preparation for a graduate career, and to play a crucial role in a NIMH-funded fMRI study as well as other smaller projects in the lab. Responsibilities and duties (with tentative % effort in parentheses) will include:
- - (50%) Screening, recruiting and testing participants for a large task-based neuroimaging (fMRI) study focused on examining multiple aspects of social learning in neurotypical and neurodiverse individuals.
- - (20%) Assisting with other projects in the lab, including a study using naturalistic paradigms to better understand strategic thinking and trust.
- - (10%) Contributing to data analyses (especially data parsing and processing) for the above projects, conference presentations and peer-reviewed publications.
- - (10%) Recruiting, training and supervising undergraduate research assistants. - (10%) Managing day-to-day lab activities (shared accounts, participants payment, updates to lab website, IRB protocol amendments, maintaining/ordering equipment).
Required qualifications include (1) a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, Neuroscience, Computer Science or other related field, (2) excellent organizational, interpersonal, and communication skills, and (3) experience with recruiting and testing human participants through task-based (PsychoPy) and/or MRI studies.
Additional preferred qualifications include good computational skills, including computer programming (R, Python, or Matlab) and data analysis/statistics, interest in social neuroscience, behavioral economics, and/or computational psychiatry, desire to work with neurodivergent populations, and experience with fMRI data collection protocols and fMRI data analysis (preprocessing, GLMs).
The position is full-time (40 hr/week) for one year. Salary will be competitive, commensurate with experience, and includes health benefits.
