Clinical Research Postdoctoral Fellow - Kids Neurodevelopment (KiND) Lab

Postdoctoral Scholar Opportunity

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) offers countless ways to change lives. Our diverse community of more than 20,000 Breakthrough Makers will inspire you to pursue passions, develop expertise, and drive innovation. At CHOP, your experience is valued; your voice is heard; and your contributions make a difference for patients and families. Join us as we build on our promise to advance pediatric care—and your career.

CHOP does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, religion, or any other legally protected categories in any employment, training, or vendor decisions or programs. CHOP recognizes the critical importance of a workforce rich in varied backgrounds and experiences and engages in ongoing efforts to achieve that through equally varied and non-discriminatory means.

Under the direction/guidance of a mentor (principal investigator), assumes responsibility for a specific, on-going research project. The experience will serve to extend, refine and enhance skills necessary for professional and career development, and will enable the individual to broaden his/her scientific background by acquiring new research capabilities. It is expected that this individual will conduct independent scholarly research, and will contribute directly to the overall research goals of the project and the research group.

This role will be expected to participate in project planning, recording and interpretation/evaluation of data, and communication of results. This position will also be expected to acquire technical, lab management, and manuscript/grant writing skills; and participate in seminars, lectures, poster sessions and presentations at national meetings. This role also may be required to supervise junior lab members, develop new methods and protocols for research, and assist with the development of other research projects in the lab.

The Kids Neuro Development (KiND) Laboratory in the Lifespan Brain Institute at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania, led by Dr. Lauren K. White, seeks a Postdoctoral Scholar to work on a Wellcome Trust–funded project examining intergenerational mechanisms of anxiety risk.

The project, RAISE-AI:
Resilience Across Intergenerational Stresses and Emotional Health through AI-Enabled Discovery, investigates how anxiety-related signals are transmitted from parents to children during naturalistic interactions. The project is particularly focused on understanding how parental stress, anxiety, behavior, physiology, and emotional communication shape children's emerging emotional responses and developmental trajectories of risk and resilience.

RAISE-AI integrates clinical and developmental science with high-resolution multimodal methods, including parent–child behavioral observations, speech and language, prosody, facial affect, posture, and autonomic physiology, including heart rate variability and respiratory sinus arrhythmia. The resulting dataset provides a unique opportunity to examine moment-to-moment dynamics of parent–child emotional communication and to advance understanding of how anxiety risk unfolds across generations.

The postdoctoral scholar will help lead the clinical, developmental, and/or dyadic components of the project, with opportunities to contribute to study design, behavioral coding and phenotyping, psycho-physiological analysis, clinical and developmental interpretation of multimodal signals, and scientific dissemination.

Depending on the scholar's interests and background, work on the project may incorporate techniques such as:

• Developmental and clinical assessment of anxiety, emotion regulation, and parent–child functioning
• Leading observational coding and analysis of parent–child interactions
• Dyadic and moment-to-moment modeling of emotional communication
• Psycho physiological analyses, including HRV/RSA and parent–child physiological synchrony
• Longitudinal and developmental statistical modeling
• Collaboration with computational researchers using speech/language analysis, computer vision, machine learning, and generative AI…