Postdoctoral Researcher in Human Stress, Motivation and Translational Biomarkers

Mission

Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)-funded project on human motivation, stress physiology, immersive behavioral testing, and biological phenotyping.

The Laboratory of Behavioral Genetics at EPFL, led by Prof. Carmen Sandi, is seeking an outstanding postdoctoral researcher with a strong technical and quantitative profile to join a SNSF-funded project investigating human motivation and stress responsiveness.

The project will develop and validate individually calibrated behavioral tasks in immersive virtual reality (VR) to quantify effort-based motivation, vigor, persistence, and goal-directed versus habitual control. It will then test how acute stress alters these processes, combining behavioral performance, physiological monitoring, movement-based phenotyping, and advanced statistical and computational analyses.

This position is part of a broader two-position recruitment linked to the same SNSF-funded project. The pr...