ERC-funded research assistant position in project on language in psychosis (TRAD-PSR-2025-17)

Description

Note: This page is for informative purposes only. The official call (particularly, the legal requirements for candidates) and all information related to the selection process (admission, short list, final result) is published in the Department’s website.

The Position

Our lab (GraC) is unfolding a research scheme in the frame of the grant ‘The delta of language’ (DELTA-LANG, ERC Synergy), which aims to map fluctuating brain states onto a linguistic model. We are looking for a highly motivated early-stage researcher who will assist in collecting and preprocessing patient data, in collaboration with two local hospitals, as well as help running pipelines for computational linguistic analyses of spontaneous speech in patients, particularly at a semantic level of language. Candidates will pursue individual and independent projects, and have the possibility to enrol for a PhD program.

Tasks

• Develop an independent project, in collaboration with senior team members. 
• Assist in the analysis of speech data from patients with mental disorders (especially psychosis) using NLP and large language models, across multiple languages.  
• Assist in local data collections (psychosis) in collaboration with clinical teams in local hospitals. 
• General research support in the frame of the project.  
• Co-organizing the work of the DELTA-team on a day-to-day level. 
• Liaising with other groups and members of the DELTA consortium. 
• Contribution to publications and communications.

We Offer

• The opportunity to join a large and dedicated consortium of research centres across Europe.
• A highly interdisciplinary research environment comprising computational linguistics, computational psychiatry, and brain imaging, both locally and internally in the consortium.
• Training and development opportunities in neuroimaging and the analysis of complex multi-modal data; and in clinical psychiatry.
• The opportunity to draw from the substantial resources of our European consortium, including generous travel and research support. 
• An inspiring local cross-disciplinary infrastructure comprising excellent computational and theoretical linguistic groups, as well as computational neuroscience (UPF’s Center of Brain & Cognition (CBC), and Brain Dynamics and Structure of Human Cognition (BraCo) group (shared with the Universitat de Barcelona at Bellvitge). 

For inquiries, please contact the PI at wolfram.hinzen@upf.edu

Qualifications

• MA in psychology, linguistics, data science, cognitive neuroscience, or another relevant field. The MA degree must be in hand at the time of the start of the contract.
• Knowledge and experience in one or more of the following fields: Clinical psychiatry, Psychology, Natural language processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), Computational semantics, Theoretical linguistics, Programming in Python or another relevant language, Knowledge of statistics and relevant packages.
• Excellent team worker.  
• Keen research interests in both language and psychiatry. 
• Interests in highly interdisciplinary research and independent mindset.
• Interest and experience in neuroimaging data analysis (fMRI) is valued.

Application Instructions

• Letter of motivation (40 points)
• CV (30 points)
• Interview (30 points)

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

UPF promotes a diverse and inclusive environment and welcomes applicants regardless of age, disability, gender, nationality, race, religion or sexual orientation.