April 2023 – March 2024

Deadline for applications: 30^th of November 2022

The Center for Mind and Cognition is a platform at the Ruhr-University Bochum that aims to foster interdisciplinary research at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, computational modelling, neuroscience and other areas of cognitive research in engineering, law and educational research. We are pleased to announce an international call for fellowships from April 2023 to March 2024 aimed at outstanding researchers.

Fellowship No. 1: Short-term Senior Fellowship (2 weeks: 1500 Euro)

Episodic Memory and Spatial Representation

The hippocampus is commonly studied as if it has disparate functions in different species: episodic memory in humans and spatial representation in rodents and other species. The fellow should be able to contribute towards a conceptual and/or computational theory that accounts for both functions in a single unified framework. Applicants should have strong interdisciplinary interests across neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. They must hold a PhD and have published at least three peer-reviewed articles on a related topic. Please direct inquiries and applications to Prof. Dr. Sen Cheng (sen.cheng@rub.de).

Fellowship No. 2: Senior Fellowship (1 month: 3000 Euro/month) or Postdoc Fellowship (1 month: 2000 Euro/month)

Philosophy of Perception and/or (Formal) Epistemology

Applicants must hold a doctoral degree and have a publication record in at least one of the mentioned areas of research. The applicant for the fellowship is expected to work at least on the level of postdoc. Ideally, the applicant’s research during the fellowship is relevant for the research conducted by the Emmy Noether Research Group ‘From Perception To Belief and Back Again’ or by one of its members. (https://fromperceptiontobelief.wordpress.com)
The Research Group conducts interdisciplinary research at the intersection of epistemology and cognitive science. The successful candidate will have access to the university library, computer resources, and will be provided with an office space during her or his research stay. In addition, the successful candidate will be welcome to participate in all the intellectual activities of the Institute of Philosophy II, the Center for Mind and Cognition, and the Emmy Noether Research Group. For further information and for submitting your application, please contact the principal investigator Peter Brössel (perception-belief@rub.de)

Fellowship No. 3: Senior Fellowship (1 month: 3000 Euro/month) or Junior Fellowship (2 months: 2000 Euro/month)

Predictive Processing

Senior applicants are expected to work at least on the level of an associate professor and should be able to connect with the work in the team of Prof. Tobias Schlicht. They should have an outstanding publication record in the area of philosophy of mind and/or cognitive science. Junior applicants should have a PhD and at least published four articles in peer-reviewed journals. Please send your application as well as requests for further information to Prof. Dr. Tobias Schlicht (tobias.schlicht@rub.de).

Fellowship No. 4: Junior Fellowship (1-2 months: 2000 Euro/month)

Episodic Memory and the Self

The fellowship should be dedicated in philosophical theory formation: The fellow is supposed to contribute to the theory of the interaction between memory and the self: how is episodic memory recall shaped by the self-model? How and to which extent is the self constituted by the memory system?

The theoretical fellowship is especially connected with chair of Prof. A. Newen but also with the neuroscientist Prof. Dr. Nikolai Axmacher. Both principle investigators are closely interacting concerning this research area and the fellow will be integrated in a DFG-research unit “Constructing Scenarios of the Past”. Please send applications to: Prof. Dr. Albert Newen (albert.newen@rub.de).

Fellowship No. 5: Senior Fellowship (1 month: 3000 Euro/month)

Philosophy of AI and Animal Cognition

Applicants are expected to work at least on the level of an associate professor and should be able to connect with the animal studies in the lab of Prof. Onur Güntürkün / Prof. Jonas Rose. They must have both an expertise in AI and in Animal Cognition and a comparative perspective allowing an interdisciplinary comparison of humans, machines and animals. Furthermore, with respect to AI, they should work on different dimensions of cognitive capacities. Concerning Animal Cognition, they should have interdisciplinary competence in Theory and Design of experimental studies. We expect a strong publication record, also with respect to the aforementioned subjects in AI and animal cognition. Please send your application as well as requests for further information to Prof. Dr. Jonas Rose, (jonas.rose@rub.de), Prof. Dr. Onur Güntürkün (onur.guentuerkuen@rub.de) or Prof. Dr. Albert Newen (albert.newen@rub.de).

Fellowship No. 6: Senior Fellowship (1 month: 3000 Euro/month)

Social Psychology

Applicants should at least work on the level of an associate professor and have an interdisciplinary approach to social psychology, conducting both empirical and theoretical research. Specifically, they should have done empirical research in the area of Situated Cognition. Moreover, they should work on a further central area in Social Psychology, namely Social Cognition. WE expect a strong publication record on these issues. Please send your application as well as requests for further information to Prof. Dr. Hans Alves (hans.alves@rub.de) or Prof. Dr. Albert Newen (albert.newen@rub.de)

Fellowship No. 7: Junior/Senior Fellowship (1-2 months: 2000 Euro/month)

Philosophy of Memory and/or Language

The Chair of Philosophy of Language and Cognition (Prof. Dr. Markus Werning) and the Center for Mind and Cognition invite applications for a one or two months fellowship in the philosophy of memory and/or the philosophy of language. Applicants must hold a doctoral degree and they must have a publication record in at least one the mentioned areas (typically at least three peer-reviewed journal articles). Ideally, the applicant’s research interests will have a relevant overlap with one or more of the research projects conducted at the Chair:

1.         projects P3, P6 or P10 in the DFG Research Group “Constructing Scenarios of the Past: A New Framework of Episodic Memory” (https://for2812.rub.de/)

2.         project BayesPrag@EEG: The Interaction of Bayesian Pragmatics and Lexical Semantics in Linguistic Interpretation: Using Event-related Potentials to Investigate Hearers’ Probabilistic Predictions (http://www.xprag.de/?page_id=4817) in the SPP on Experimental Pragmatics xprag.de.

3.         project LING 2.1: Effects of Enacted Communication on Meaning: Co-speech Gestures and Non-Verbal Signaling in the RTG Situated Cognition (https://situated-cognition.com/projects/ongoing-projects/)

Please direct inquiries and applications to Prof. Dr. Markus Werning (markus.werning@rub.de).

Fellowship No. 8: Senior Fellowship (1 month: 3000 Euro/month) or Junior Fellowship (2 months: 2000 Euro/month)

Advanced analyses and computational modelling of electrophysiological data

The fellowship is ideally suited for an experimentalist, who would like to try out some new analysis and/or computational modelling on one of their data sets, with the support and expertise available in our Neural Data Science group. For example, if you have an existing data set of electrophysiological recordings (spike data or local field potentials) in combination with behaviour, we could apply advanced data analysis methods such as dimensionality-reduction or other machine learning approaches to your data. Your data set should be related to cognitive functions, e.g. in cortical, hippocampal, or basal ganglia networks. Of course, if your experiment contains additional manipulations such as optogenetics we can try to incorporate that into the analyses and models as well. Applicants are expected to be proficient in data processing and programming (e.g. in Python or Matlab).
Please send your application as well as requests for further information to Prof. Dr. Robert Schmidt (robert.schmidt@rub.de).

General Information: Fellowships & Applications

We provide a lively and productive research environment with a great variety of scientific activities including workshops, research colloquia, and international guest researchers. All fellows are invited to deliver a fellow lecture and will have the opportunity to meet members of the Center for Mind & Cognition.

Applications should include:

1. A (brief) letter of application including personal information academic background, and research interests (please indicate the number of and the title of the fellowship you apply for).
2. A brief proposal for a research project (1-2 pages) if the fellowship is planned for at least one month.
3. CV including a list of publications, talks, conferences attended and teaching experience.
4. One representative article as PDF document.
5. Only for applicants for a junior fellowship: names of two potential referees.

All documents of the candidate should be sent electronically. We regret that we will not be able to return any submitted material.