Information for Prospective Trainees

Research requires a high level of intellectual curiosity to continuously drive learning and motivation toward acquring new knowledge. Generating new knowledge on how the brain enables social behavior is a truly exciting endeavour. It also requires good communication skills (e.g., writing) so that your science can be understood and the progress can be made.

If you are interested in joining our research team as a postdoctoral associate, graduate student, or undergraduate student, please consider the information below to help judge your fit to our work and our lab.

In our laboratory, we are particularly interested in collaborating with trainees with the following characteristics:

  • Strong interest in thinking about research topics at multiple levels of analysis and neurobiology (behavior, brain areas, circuits, cells, and molecules), regardless of one’s interest in focusing research at one of these levels.
  • Quantitatively strong and experienced or strong interest in strengthening quantitative skills
  • Ability to communicate scientific findings and perspectives through good writing.
  • Ability to flexibly think in details as well as in big pictures

Furthermore, we highly value the following characteristics in our trainees:

  • Excited about the possibility on intellectually contributing one’s expertise to research projects of other lab members
  • Thrives on forming new collaborative lines of research of shared research interests

Importantly, everyone in the lab must respect each other regardless of gender, race, disability, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, political or religious views, and other factors contributing to individual differences. We expect everyone to be professionally kind to one another to create a truly wonderful research environment

We would like to emphasize that everyone is different, when it comes to who they are and also when it comes to how they contribute to science. We strongly value diversity in our trainees, and we thrive to further increase and maintain diversity in our lab. If you are a prospective trainee of a minority group, a non-traditional background, or with disability, we particularly encourage you to consider applying to become a trainee in our lab.  

Thank you for your interest in our lab.

Steve Chang, Lab Director

 

Useful Resources

Applying to graduate school “Bootcamp” put together by the Yale Psychology’s Committee on Diversity and Inclusion together with Yale Graduate School of Arts & Sciences [recorded video, documents].