Postdoc in Adaptive Learning Agents & Cognitive AI

University of Arizona; Tucson (AZ); On-site; USD 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

The NAIADEL Lab in the University of Arizona Department of Psychology seeks a Postdoctoral Research Associate with expertise in developing and analyzing adaptive learning agents to investigate the computational mechanisms of human intelligence and agency. The lab builds a neurocomputational theory of adaptive intelligence and agency.

The candidate will lead the development of new adaptive agents for the lab's game-based environment, train agents on human data, and contribute to first-author

Qualifications

• PhD in computer science, ML, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, statistics, applied mathematics, or a closely related field.
• Demonstrated experience designing, implementing, training, and evaluating learning agents or neural-network models for sequential decision-making.
• Demonstrated programming skills in Python and at least one modern deep learning framework.
• A record of peer‑reviewed publications appropriate to career stage.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and train new reinforcement learning agents for game-based environments with changing task structure and controllability.
• Treat trained agents as scientific models and compare with human data from various game-based paradigms.
• Develop methods linking agent behavior to human mechanisms using simulations and out-of-sample prediction.
• Lead first-author manuscripts for machine learning venues and cognitive science journals.
• Collaborate with engineers, clinicians, and neuroscientists to connect agents with adaptive tasks and clinical measures.

Skills

Learning agents

Reinforcement learning

Python programming

Deep learning

Education

PhD in computer science, ML, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, statistics, applied mathematics, or closely related field

Tools

PyTorch

Gymnasium/rl environments

Job description

The NAIADEL Lab in the University of Arizona Department of Psychology seeks a Postdoctoral Research Associate with expertise in developing and analyzing adaptive learning agents to investigate the computational mechanisms of human intelligence and agency. The lab builds a neurocomputational theory of adaptive intelligence and agency.

The candidate will lead the development of new adaptive agents for the lab's game-based environment, train agents on human data, and contribute to first-author