APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS:

• CURRENT PENN STATE EMPLOYEE (faculty, staff, technical service, or student), please login to Workday to complete the internal application process. Please do not apply here, apply internally through Workday.

• CURRENT PENN STATE STUDENT (not employed previously at the university) and seeking employment with Penn State, please login to Workday to complete the student application process. Please do not apply here, apply internally through Workday.

• If you are NOT a current employee or student, please click “Apply” and complete the application process for external applicants.

 

Approval of remote and hybrid work is not guaranteed regardless of work location. For additional information on remote work at Penn State, see Notice to Out of State Applicants.

This is a term position; length of the term will be discussed during the interview process. Continuation past the term length discussed will be based on university need, performance, and/or availability of funding.

 

POSITION SPECIFICS

The Cognition, Affect, and Temperament Laboratory at The Pennsylvania State University, headed by Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar, seeks a Postdoctoral Scholar (http://www.catlabpsu.com).

Ideal start date would be early fall.

The postdoctoral scholar will have the opportunity to work on NIH-funded studies investigating a number of complex biological, cognitive, and social mechanisms that shape early trajectories.

The primary studies will be:

P-CAT, an NIMH-funded longitudinal study that will examine parental transmission of anxiety to preschool children.  This project includes fNIRS (parent-child interpersonal neural synchronization), EEG, and behavioral coding and will focus on parent-child interaction and socialization of anxious behaviors through child observation.  A sub-aim of the study focuses on anxiety transmission in fathers.

• HBCD, a consortium study linking 25 sites across the country. The HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study will create a representative sample of families, recruited in pregnancy, and then followed in the first decade of life.  Findings from this cohort study will provide a template of normative neurodevelopment in infants and young children and help untangle the impacts of perinatal exposures to substances and childhood environments on developmental trajectories. Data from this comprehensive study will include infant MRI, EEG, neurodevelopmental testing, biospecimens, observed behavior, and parental report.

The post-doctoral scholar will also have the opportunity to contribute to and work with data from a number of studies.  One example includes:

• LAnT, a completed  NIMH-funded longitudinal study that examined the role of attention and temperament in the early emergence of social behavior and anxiety symptoms in the first two years of life.  We completed data collection with 357 families, providing rich data for follow up analyses and publications.  Data from this study include EEG, eye-tracking, observed social behavior, and