Open Postdoctoral position, faculty mentor Meg Cychosz

The Speech and Cognitive Development Lab (PI: Cychosz) in the Stanford University Department of Linguistics seeks a postdoctoral researcher to investigate fundamental questions about how children acquire language and develop communication skills. 

We especially welcome applicants who want to contribute to research on language and speech development across different populations and contexts, including children acquiring language in different cultural settings outside of the United States to children with different sensory experiences (e.g. deafness). Recent work in our lab has focused on: 

• Developing transformer-based models to classify infant and child speech maturity from naturalistic audio recordings across typologically diverse languages
• Creating self-supervised learning algorithms that can assess phonological development and speech complexity in children from birth through age 6, with applications to both typical and atypical populations
• Investigating how children's phonological working memory abilities develop across different cultural and linguistic contexts

The successful applicant is welcome to develop their own research program, under supervision of the principal investigator, as well as work across the many outstanding resources, institutes (e.g. Institute for Human-Centered AI) , and faculty labs across campus in linguistics, computer science, psychology, and otolaryngology. Applicants are expected to apply for independent funding through Stanford-internal mechanisms and/or external sources such as NRSA fellowships and NSF SBE postdoctoral awards.

We especially welcome applicants with theoretical interest in child language development, strong computational and analytical skills (deep learning frameworks), and/or experience with large-scale data analysis, algorithm development, or computational modeling.