Department of Psychology
The Department of Psychology provides a stimulating and vibrant research environment designed to encourage and support individuals in crossing conventional disciplinary boundaries to collaborate in research. You will join the growing research team of the Essex Babylab, which is part of our Centre for Brain Science (CBS). The CBS is purpose-built to house state-of-the-art equipment that allows staff to directly measure and modulate brain activity, as well as a range of equipment to measure physiological response (e.g. EMG, EEG, heart rate, etc.).
For this position, you will work with Dr. Maria Laura Filippetti on a project financed by the Academy of Medical Science (AMS) and entitled ‘The developmental mechanisms underlying emotional eating’. This is an exciting opportunity for a post-doctoral researcher to work on a novel approach that combines developmental cognitive neuroscience and embodied psychology to study emotional eating in the first years of life. More specifically, you will use a combination of behavioural and electrophysiological measures to study how parental feeding practices and toddlers’ emotion regulation contribute to the extent to which toddlers are drawn towards different types of food.
Duties of the Role
The purpose of this role will be to combine behavioural and electrophysiological measures to examine the developmental mechanisms underlying emotional eating. The expected results will provide the groundwork for the development of prevention strategies, aimed at educating parents on the impact restrictive feeding and at fostering self-regulation early in toddlerhood.
Duties will include engaging in individual and/or collaborative research activity, producing research outputs for publication at acceptable levels of volume and academic excellence and disseminating the results of research and scholarship through appropriate Knowledge Exchange activities. You will also be responsible for recruitment of families, data collection and analysis.
A full list of duties can be found within the attached job pack.
Skills and qualifications required
The successful candidate will hold a relevant doctoral level degree in cognitive or developmental psychology/neuroscience, ideally with a focus on emotion and/or body perception, or in other relevant fields (e.g. eating behaviour) or be close to completion of PhD.
You must also have previous experience in working with developmental population and it is expected of you to have evidence of a developing research agenda, engagement in high-quality research activity and a developing research profile; experience of contributing to small research programmes or defined areas of larger projects, and of developing research objectives and proposals; and strong communication skills, both written and verbal.
Good statistical and programming skills (e.g. Matlab, R, and/or Python) are essential for this post.
At the University of Essex, internationalism and diversity is central to who we are and what we do. We are committed to being a cosmopolitan, internationally oriented university that is welcoming to staff and students from all countries, faiths and backgrounds, where you can find the world in one place.
To support this commitment we have our Global Forum, a staff-led network that promotes and celebrates the rich cultural diversity among Essex staff, and our Colchester campus based Faith Centre, which hosts regular services, meetings and events organised by our chaplains and faith representatives. For more information see: https://www.essex.ac.uk/life/student-facilities/religion-and-faith
Please see the attached job pack, which contains a full job description and person specification which outlines the full duties, skills, qualifications and experience needed for this role plus more information relating to the post. We recommend you read this information carefully before making an application. Applications should be made on-line, but if you would like advice or help in making an application, or need information in a different format, please telephone the Resourcing Team (01206 876559).
*More information: Working at the University