Postdoctoral Fellow - Computational Affective and Social Cognition Lab

Hiring Department:
Department of Psychology

Position Open To:
All Applicants

Weekly Scheduled

Hours:

40

FLSA Status:
Exempt from FLSA

Earliest

Start Date:

Immediately

Position Duration:
Expected to Continue Until May 31, 2030

Location:

UT MAIN CAMPUS

The CASCog Lab, an interdisciplinary lab at the intersection of Psychology and Artificial Intelligence, is housed in the Department of Psychology, in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas  our lab, we are interested in studying how people and machines understand emotions. Recent projects include: how generative AI may be able to provide empathy, how people perceive such artificial empathy, and how this relates to AI sycophancy and mental health.

For more information about the research conducted in the lab, please visit the lab website at (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below). or Prof. Ong's website at  This position is a fixed-term of one year.

The Computational Affective and Social Cognition Lab (CASCogLab) in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, directed by Professor Desmond Ong, is hiring a full-time Postdoctoral Research Fellow for academic year 2026-27.

The Postdoctoral Fellow will work primarily on an NSF-funded project related to studying how well AI models understand human emotions. The scope includes questions like: how do machines reason about human emotions in context, over time, and appropriately reason over interventions (e.g., emotion regulation). The Postdoctoral Fellow will also be invited to contribute to other ongoing and related projects in the lab: characterizing the advantages and disadvantages of artificial empathy;

studying the implications for mental health; studying the implications for development (e.g., adolescents); developing technical solutions for mitigating some harmful AI behaviors (like AI sycophancy); contributing to mental health and other safety-relevant benchmarks; policy-relevant activities. The Postdoctoral Research Fellows will work closely with the Principal Investigator, Prof. Ong, on all stages of the research process: from conducting literature reviews, designing and running empirical studies including both experiments with humans as well as with machines (via simulations etc), to data analysis and computational modeling of the data, to writing up the results for publication and presentation.

The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will propose and lead research projects of their own under the supervision of the Principal Investigator. Finally, the postdoctoral research fellows will contribute to grant writing and aspects of grant management as part of their training.

• Leading research projects and handling all aspects of the research process, including: handling ethics review and compliance; recruiting participants for empirical studies; designing and implementing simulation studies involving AI models; managing and analyzing data; managing code bases; and supervising undergraduate research assistants
• Writing up research into manuscripts, and presenting research at conferences
• Grantsmanship, including applying for training fellowships or assisting with larger grant applications
• Other duties as assigned

• Ph.D. in Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, or a related field received no more than three years prior to the start date
• Substantial research experience and research-relevant skills, including:
  Experience conducting psychological experiments: designing and constructing experiments, recruiting and consenting participants, and collecting data;
  Statistical skills, including data analysis and…