Research Postdoctoral Fellow - Center for Autism Research

The Center for Autism Research at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania is recruiting a postdoctoral fellow for an NIH-supported project using innovative technologies to understand social communication. The work applies perceptual computing, particularly computer-vision analysis of facial expressions and gestures, to track social and affective processes in neurotypical and neurodivergent youth during naturalistic interactions with peers, alongside computational linguistics and cognitive-neuroscience measures including peripheral nervous system function and brain imaging.

The fellow focuses on data analysis, manuscript preparation and grant development under structured mentorship from principal investigator John Herrington in the Emotion and Neurodiversity Laboratory, with links to CHOP's Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics, the Linguistic Data Consortium and Penn Computer Science. The appointment is for two years, with possible extension.

PhD in psychology with a focus on social and/or affective information processing (clinical, developmental or cognitive training likely the strongest fit), or a PhD in computer engineering, data science, quantitative methods or a related field with emphasis on computer vision or wearable-device data such as ECG; a record of independently writing code, preferably in Python.