Research Associate

Research Associate

School of Psychology

Cardiff Babylab is looking for two full-time Research Associates to join our team, which will be funded by UKRI.  Our research examines infants’ and toddlers’ everyday experiences, with a particular focus on how attentional and motor development shapes the ways in which young children engage with, adapt to, shape, and learn from their everyday environments. We combine naturalistic and controlled approaches, using methods such as head-mounted cameras, screen-based and head-mounted eye-tracking, standardised behavioural assessments, observational measures, and computational analyses.

Our team brings together expertise from developmental psychology, computer science, and applied research. We study both typically developing infants and toddlers and young children with developmental conditions, with a particular programme of research focused on Down syndrome.

The postholders will contribute to a range of ongoing projects investigating early development across naturalistic and controlled settings. The precise balance of activities can be tailored to the successful candidates’ backgrounds and interests. There will also be opportunities to work with existing datasets and to take an active role in developing analyses, publications, and conference presentations.

Typical responsibilities may include:

• Working with naturalistic audio and video data alongside other developmental measures
• Developing and implementing data processing and analysis workflows, including machine learning tools
• Using computational modelling to create mechanistic accounts of early development
• Supervising and training research assistants and students involved in data collection and annotation
• Supporting data collection
• Contributing to data management, documentation, and research governance
• Participating in lab meetings and wider scientific activities
• Leading or contributing to publications, conference presentations, and other research outputs

We are particularly interested in candidates whose expertise complements our work in developmental science, naturalistic measurement, behavioural methods, computational approaches, and multimodal data analysis. These roles offer substantial scope for candidates to develop their own research profile while contributing to the broader scientific programme of the Cardiff Babylab.

These positions offer an opportunity to join an active and collaborative developmental science environment and to gain experience working across complementary methodological approaches and research populations.

Research Environment

The successful candidate will be based at the Cardiff Babylab within the Cardiff University Centre for Human Developmental Science (CUCHDS). CUCHDS provides access to advanced facilities for developmental research, including state-of-the-art eye-tracking, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and magnetoencephalography using optically pumped magnetometers (OPM-MEG).

Candidates may also have opportunities to engage with the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), one of the largest and most technologically advanced imaging centres in Europe. Both CUCHDS and CUBRIC are part of Cardiff University’s School of Psychology, which has a strong international reputation for research in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience and was ranked 6th in the UK for research power in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework.

The successful candidate will join a supportive, collaborative, and intellectually vibrant community that values curiosity, innovation, and rigorous scientific practice. We strongly encourage applications from researchers from underrepresented backgrounds and are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive environment.

If you are motivated by big theoretical questions, excited by rich multimodal data, and eager to help shape a new, process-based science of development, we would love to hear from you.

For informal enquiries, contact Dr Hana D’Souza ([email protected]).

These positions are full-time, 35 hours per week and fixed term for 12 months or until 14 May 2028, whichever is soonest.

Salary: £41,064 - £46,049 per annum (Grade 6). Appointments to roles at Cardiff University are usually made at bottom of scale unless in exceptional circumstances. Please note that it is not expected that we will appoint above Grade 6.32, currently £41,064 per annum.