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Research in the heart of boston
The Subjectivity Lab is currently looking to recruit a postdoc to start right away in 2024 or as early as possible in 2025. We are also looking to recruit a graduate student for the 2025-2026 academic year. Of course, we are always interested in hearing from talented and enthusiastic prospective lab members even when we are not actively seeking them (e.g., undergraduates, visitors from any discipline). Feel free to send Jorge a note if you’re interested in joining our group!
See below for more information.
Postdoctoral Researchers
We are looking to recruit a postdoctoral researcher to join an international, multi-site, multi-year generously funded project on the neural basis of perception & mental imagery. The project is an adversarial collaboration to pit higher-order theories of consciousness against each other. The project will leverage psychophysics, neuroimaging (fMRI), modeling and machine learning to disentangle the neural correlates of consciousness and their shared codes across perception and imagination. Feel free to get in touch with Jorge if your research interests and experience line up with the lab’s needs and formally apply by send your CV here. You can read more about the project here.
Graduate Students
We will be recruiting a graduate student during the 2025-2026 cycle. If your interests strongly align with the lab’s, don’t hesitate sending Jorge an email to get in touch; please include your CV and a few lines saying what kind of research you’ve done in the past and how you see your current interests fitting into one or more of the lab’s lines of research. Even if it’s not exactly stuff we’ve done, there could be a reasonable way of doing new work together, so don’t hesitate writing us.
Undergrad Research Assistants
Special Project using Eye Tracking and Virtual Reality (VR) to measure conscious awareness is looking for RAs!
We have a special project where we aim to measure conscious awareness by doing pupillometry (the measure of small, but quite meaningful, changes in pupil size). We plan to use advanced eye tracking and virtual reality (VR) equipment. Experience doing eye tracking or using VR is not necessary. Initially RA-ship can start on a voluntary basis and based on progress and compatibility it can turn into a full-time paid co-op opportunity or a part-time position. Initially RA-ship can start on a voluntary basis and based on progress and compatibility it can turn into a full-time paid co-op opportunity or a part-time position funded through work-study funding. Students from all majors and backgrounds are encouraged to apply (e.g., psychology, behavioral neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, engineering, etc.).
If you want to gain research experience, working with subjects and collecting data, please get in touch. No previous experience or technical skills required for this project!
RA Opportunities for leading your own project
Working in a lab as an undergraduate is a fantastic way to get research experience, which can be useful not only for preparing yourself for the next steps of a career in science, but also finding out whether you enjoy doing research in the first place. More importantly, research is interesting!
Our projects are focused on vision science: how our visual system process objects and features around us. We also ask questions about metacognition: how we know that we know or that we don’t know something. (See this publication to give yourself an idea of what we do and whether you’re interested in it. NB: although we collaborate with people working on misinformation, our main work looks more like this). We are also interested in questions about mental imagery or visualization (our lab hasn’t yet published on this but you can read this to get a sense of what questions interest us).
Our work is somewhat technical in nature, and requires programming skills. But you could lead your own project! Most of our experiments use either online testing (for which you must know JavaScript/HTML/CSS or be able to pick it up rather quickly) or in person experiments using eye tracking (for which you must know Python or MatLab or be able to pick it up rather quickly). Check out our simple coding challenge here. If you can solve it, and you’re interested in the questions we ask, then an internship in our lab may be for you!
Please send us an email if you can solve the challenge and want to learn more about our research assistantship opportunities. Initially RA-ship can start on a voluntary basis and based on progress and compatibility it can turn into a full-time paid co-op opportunity or a part-time position. If you’re eligible for work-study funding, you could use it for this internship! Students from all majors and backgrounds who satisfy the technical requirements described above are encouraged to apply (e.g., psychology, behavioral neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, engineering, etc.). NB: Remote options available!
Other Visitors
We are also happy to consider other types of visitors to the lab. For example, we may be able to host short-term (a few months) or long-term (e.g., 1 year) visits. Though we do not currently have funding for such positions, visitors of this sort can often become official members of our department during their visits and offer you a desk in our lab. If you’re interested to conduct empirical research, we may even be able to fund your work (e.g., the costs associated with subjects and equipment).
People in the Boston area who want to join our lab meetings are also welcome. Visitors may also come from areas other than psychology and neuroscience. We would love to have an in-house philosopher, computer scientist, artist, etc.!
If this kind of visit sounds right to you, please feel free to send Jorge a note!
