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The University of Zurich (UZH) and New York University (NYU) are seeking talented and motivated individuals to join an international consortium dedicated to advancing the field of digital prediction and intervention for suicidality. We invite applications for the following positions: one postdoctoral researcher and one doctoral researcher at UZH in Zurich, Switzerland (in collaboration with Prof. Sebastian Olbrich and Prof. Birgit Kleim), and one postdoctoral researcher at NYU in New York, USA (in collaboration with Prof. Katharina Schultebraucks).
MULTICAST is a four-year SNSF-founded project and a collaborative effort between the Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich, the Department of Psychology of the University of Zurich, the German Department of the University of Zurich, and the Department of Psychiatry, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, USA.
It takes an interdisciplinary approach to the prediction of suicidal ideation (SI) and suicidal behavior (SB) by drawing on key linguistic, psychological, clinical, and neurobiological features. The overarching aim of the project is to broaden our understanding of how suicidal ideation can best be predicted and to develop precise and efficacious smartphone-based treatment strategies.
The primary goal of the postdoctoral positions will be to take over responsibilities of the MULTICAST project, leading studies and use data to examine predict and treat suicidality.
Postdocs: Responsibilities
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PhDs: Responsibilities
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What we offer
Place of work
UZH, Zurich: Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich, Lenggstrasse 31 8032 Zürich
NYU, New York:
Start of employment and application procedures
Earliest starting date is in July and can be negotiated. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis until the positions are filled. Please submit your application (CV, motivation letter, two letters of recommendation; for postdocs: two pieces of written work, manuscript or published paper) as a single pdf to: coordination.multicast@bli.uzh.ch. All questions regarding the posts can be addressed to coordination.multicast@bli.uzh.ch.
The research at the Institute of Comparative Linguistics covers various areas, including psycholinguistics, comparative linguistics, evolutionary linguistics, descriptive linguistics, Indo-European linguistics and the evolutionary neuroscience of language. The doctoral position will be hosted in the evolutionary neuroscience of language group.
As part of an Ambizione project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the role of selective attention in language processing is being investigated.
Auditory stimuli to which we direct our attention (e.g. the speech signal of our interlocutor) are amplified in the brain by «top-down» control signals, and those which we ignore (e.g. ambient noise in the background) are suppressed. This is shown, for example, in the selective neural tracking of the speech signal observed and the lateralization of the alpha oscillatory brain activity during spatial hearing.
There is evidence that these neuronal processes of attention control are impaired in hearing loss and tinnitus. However, it is still unclear which sub-processes are affected: the amplification of target stimuli or the suppression of background noise.
The aim of the project is to use electroencephalography (EEG) to identify neuronal markers of these attention sub-processes in people with hearing loss and tinnitus.
Subsequently, the relevance of the identified markers during attention control is investigated using non-invasive electrical brain stimulation and neurofeedback.
For more information, please visit the website
The project MULTICAST "A MULTIdisCiplinary Approach to prediction and treatment of Suicidality" will be funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Sinergia) for four years starting 01.09.2022. Under the direction of Birgit Kleim (Psychological Institute UZH and Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich), Sebastian Olbrich (Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich), Katharina Schultebraucks (Data Science Institute, Columbia University) and Guido Seiler (German Seminar and LiZZ, UZH), the project is developing methods to better determine the suicidality risk of severely depressed patients on the basis of linguistic and non-verbal markers.
In the specific linguistic part of the project, led by Guido Seiler, the focus is on linguistic, especially grammatical/syntactical features. In addition to lexical markers, you will mainly analyze syntactic means of information structure and listener guidance as well as the extent of syntactic complexity. In this way, you will contribute to answering the question of how suicidal risk and resilience are reflected in the syntactic form of patients' utterances, as well as whether the development of mental health status over time is reflected in changes in patients' speech production. The doctoral position will evaluate speech recordings of patients, most of whom speak Swiss German, according to such criteria. She will be supported by student assistants who will transcribe and annotate the recordings.
For more information, please visit the website.