In a longstanding collaboration between the Moffitt-Caspi Team and the Hariri Lab https://www.haririlab.com/home.html, we are recruiting a new PhD student and a new postdoctoral fellow for fall 2025. We seek trainees who have a specific interest in midlife brain aging, its origins in early life, and its implications for mental and physical health in later life. The research training will be grounded in the ongoing longitudinal Dunedin Study, which has followed a population-representative birth cohort for six decades, funded by the National Institute on Aging. We collected a first wave of MRI data in 875 Study members when they were 45 years old and are currently collecting a second wave of data as Dunedin Study members turn 52 years old this year. We expect the second wave of data collection to be ready for analysis by fall semester 2025. This will lead to many opportunities to map individual life histories (e.g., childhood adversity, environmental exposures, history of mental illness) onto changes in midlife brain structure, cognitive changes, epigenetic aging measures, and risk markers for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The research training will also afford opportunities to extend findings from the Dunedin Study through other MRI datasets and epigenetic datasets, including those collected through ADNI, UK Biobank, BrainLat, and ENIGMA. The trainee will be collectively supervised by Avshalom Caspi, Ahmad Hariri, and Temi Moffitt. Applications for the Duke PhD program may be submitted through either the Clinical Psychology training area or the Cognition & the Brain training area in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, as well as the Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program. Applications for Postdoc training can be submitted through a number of T32 Training Grant programs in the Duke Medical School. Ideal candidates will have existing research experience with MRI data analysis including a strong background in programming, or experience with epigenetics research. Contact us to discuss your application.
The position primarily involves managing large longitudinal datasets: designing and maintaining electronic data directories; maintaining data integrity and documentation; and updating relevant data and scripting repositories. The work involves working with the principal investigators; collaborating with members of the research team and researchers outside Duke University (Ph.D. students, postdoctoral fellows, statisticians, bioinformaticians) on dataset management and descriptive analyses; and co-authoring papers for publication.
The individual should be comfortable with the quantitative side of research and working directly with the data, but also needs to understand the context and purpose of what the lab does and the clientele it serves. The desired candidate should be able to manage large datasets and also go beyond the numbers to think about how these data and studies are driving and informing policy and having an impact on the lives of those involved and beyond.
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