Opportunities

• For Graduate Students
• For Post-Docs
• For UW Undergraduates
• Participate in an Experiment

Information for Prospective Graduate Students:

The psychology department’s web page contains information about application procedures, the structure of the graduate program, and other information for prospective applicants. Our department was established in 1888 and has a long distinguished history. The current department is one of the top 10 if you believe the US News and World Report. Even if you're appropriately skeptical about their methodology, we can tell you that it is a genuinely excellent department in all areas (cognitive, social, developmental, clinical, biological). There is a particularly strong core of people with interests in language (MacDonald, Seidenberg, Saffran, Alibali, Kluender, Evans, Gernsbacher, Glenberg and Tim Rogers who joined the dept in the fall of 2004), a state-of-the-art research-only neuroimaging facility, and a friendly, stimulating, challenging environment.

Madison is a comfortable and pleasant place to live and work, especially if you like the "active outdoors" lifestyle. The university is situated on one of a chain of several lakes; the Union Terrace is where people go to watch the sun set and have a beer or some of the ice cream made on campus. The whole terrace is wired for wireless (a good oxymoron but true) and so you can read your email too. People do a lot a bicycle riding; there are serious paths all over town and in the surrounding area. There's also sailing, canoeing, running, and a lot of winter sports. When people are ice skating in Tenney Park it's a picture of classic serenity. There's one of the best restaurants in the country ( L'Etoile; you don’t have to take our word for it), the largest outdoor farmer's market in the country, and some extremely good artisanal cheese to go along with local favorites like cheese curds (they squeak). Most of what you really want to know about where to eat, drink or hear music is listed in the weekly publication Isthmus, which has a good web page. Contact the students for more information about what life is like here; some can provide very interesting comparisons between Madison and Southern California.

[A special note about the weather. The Wisconsin stereotype is that the weather is harsh; the reality is that sometimes it is and usually it isn't. We get as much snow as Boston and more sunshine than Pittsburgh. The countryside is rolling hills; once you begin to appreciate the beauty you can see why Frank Lloyd Wright located the original Taliesin studio complex nearby. When it snows, it's easier to deal with in a moderate-sized town where you don't have to drive. There's also less pollution and a high level of eco-, social, and political awareness. In short: people manage to live quite comfortably here and for many the climate and local ecology are part of the attraction. If you're mainly interested in close proximity to beaches or downhill skiing, you'd be out of luck, but you probably also wouldn't be going to graduate school.]

All graduate students work full-time toward their degrees; financial support is provided through one of the several research grants that fund our work, the neuroscience training grant, or university fellowships. (Stipends are not sufficient to allow students to dine at L'Etoile on a regular basis, however.) Additionally, in order to gain teaching experience, each student will typically have a teaching assistantship at some point in his or her graduate career. Students with strong interests in the neuroscience end of cognitive neuroscience should also consider the Neuroscience Training Program.

We will be recruiting new graduate students to enter the program for the fall of 2006, as well as a post-doc. We are particularly seeking individuals with the following kinds of interests:

• spoken language production and its interface with comprehension;
• working memory and language comprehension;
• computational and neurobiological bases of plasticity, critical period effects;
• statistical learning mechanisms in language acquisition and use;
• neuroimaging, computational modeling.

We invite the top applicants to campus for a visit in early spring; you spend 1-2 days (expenses paid) learning about the department, meeting faculty and students, and getting a sense of what the intellectual and cultural environments are like.

We have had many outstanding students in the Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at USC, and now at UW-Madison. Our students typically have backgrounds in psychology, computer science, linguistics, and/or neuroscience. Prospective students should feel free to contact Professor MacDonald, Professor Seidenberg, and/or current graduate students, for additional information about the program.

Information for Prospective Post-Docs:

We are seeking 1-2 post docs with interests in any of the various aspects of language that we study, but particularly the interface between language production and comprehension, the interface between language acquisition and skilled processing, and the interface between language behavior and its brain and computational bases. (That's a lot of potential interfacing. We could add "and the interfaces between any of the above"!) Contact MacDonald or Seidenberg for additional information.

Opportunities for UW Undergraduate Students:

We are currently seeking undergraduate assistants to work in our lab. A commitment of at least two semesters is typically required. For more information, please contact Dana Krauss.

Opportunities to Participate in Experiments:

We have several studies currently in progress, and are seeking subjects for the related experiments. Typically, subjects must speak English as their first language, have normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and have no diagnosed psychatric disorders. Though most of our studies draw subjects from the Psych 202 subject pool, we do occasionally have opportunities for paid subjects, particularly during the summer months. If you are interested being a paid participant in one or more of these studies, please email Dana Krauss with "PAID PARTICIPATION" as the subject line.