Research Associate (m/f/d) Applying Machine Learning to Developmental Psychology
2025-04-09
As a humanistic, sustainable and action-oriented university, Leuphana University of Lüneburg stands for innovation in education and science. Methodological diversity, interdisciplinary cooperation, transdisciplinary cooperation with practice and an overall dynamic development characterise its research profile in the core topics of education, culture, management/technology, sustainability and state. Its international study model with the Leuphana College, the Leuphana Graduate School and the Leuphana Professional School is unique in Germany and has won many awards.
The University is looking for a responsible, motivated and committed person for the Department of Developmental Psychology (PI: Prof. Dr. Manuel Bohn) as soon as possible as a
Research Associate (m/f/d)
Applying Machine Learning to Developmental Psychology
(salary group EG 13 TV-L, 75%)
The starting date is July 1st, 2025 or later. The position is fixed term for 4 years.
The position is part of the project “A global Developmental Psychology” which investigates socio-communicative development in children between 3 and 5 years of age growing up in Kenya, Germany and Turkey. The project has three strands: 1) to study socio-communicative development, 2) to study everyday experience and 3) to link everyday experience to socio-communicative development. The position offered here will work on the second and third strand.
Everyday experiences are recorded using small-wearable cameras that children wear for longer periods of time. For each child, we record multiple hours of material. In our lab, we have developed a pipeline for automatically processing these recordings to detect e.g. people or objects with high accuracy. The successful candidate will build on these foundations and adapt the models to recordings from different cultural contexts and to explore new models (e.g. multi-modal models).
Your tasks:
- Curate and manage large datasets (egocentric audio and video recordings) on children’s everyday experiences from three different cultural communities (Kenya, Germany and Turkey).
- Apply and adapt state-of-the-art machine learning and computer vision models (e.g. YOLO), to automatically detect and classify individuals, objects, and actions within the recorded data.
- Explore multi-modal models to study social interaction.
- Collaborate with international team to coordinate data collection in Kenya and Turkey
- Collaborate with other team members (PhDs and Postdocs) to link everyday experiences to measures of cognitive development.
Your profile:
- Degree in Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Psychology or a similar subject or comparable past work experience (e.g., research software engineering)
- Experience in one or more programming languages (e.g. Python, C, C++, etc.)
- Experience in or strong interest to learn a range of Computer Vision and Machine Learning approaches and frameworks (Tensorflow, Pytorch, Darknet, etc.)
- Further desirable experiences include proficiency in the statistical programming language R; running code via high-performance computing clusters
- Record of documenting and implementing solutions in a user-friendly way so that they become accessible to members of the team and the research community in general
- Very good communication skills in English (German skills are optional)
- Interest in child development
- Motivation and ability to teach yourself new methods
- Committed team player who shares and contributes to our passion for Open Science
Our offer:
- Friendly, supportive and interdisciplinary team
- Excellent supervision
- No teaching obligations (opportunities for teaching are offered if wanted)
- Generous funding for conference travels and summer schools
- an inspiring working environment as part of the university community of researchers, teachers, students and staff in technology and administration,
- a workplace at one of the most beautiful university locations in Germany in a true campus university with an internationally acclaimed central building by Daniel Libeskind and the directly adjacent Wilschenbruch nature reserve,
- a high level of job security as part of the public service,
- an additional company pension scheme through the Versorgungsanstalt des Bundes und der Länder (VBL),
- flexible and family-friendly working hours within a flexitime framework from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.,
- flexible and family-friendly opportunities to alternate between presence work and mobile work,
- an extensive internal and external continuing education programme,
- a wide range of sporting activities sponsored by the university, which employees can take part in for one hour per week during working hours to promote their health,
- a university-sponsored catering service for lunch and dinner in the refectory,
- a Germany ticket sponsored by the university as a job ticket
Your application:
If you have any questions regarding the content of the position, please contact Prof. Dr. Manuel Bohn (manuel.bohn@leuphana.de).
Leuphana University of Lüneburg promotes professional gender equality and heterogeneity among its members. Applications from people with severe disabilities will be given preferential consideration if they have the same qualifications. Please also note our data protection information for applicants.
We look forward to receiving your application. Please send it including a CV, motivation letter, writing example (e.g. Master’s thesis), coding examples/links to online repositories (e.g., GitHub, if applicable) and a list of two potential references by 12.05.2025 preferably electronically (as a single merged pdf file) or by mail to:
Leuphana University of Lüneburg
Human Resources and Legal Affairs / Application Management
Subject: PhD Quant
Universitätsallee 1
21335 Lüneburg
Germany