RECRUITING NEW PhD Student and Postdoc for fall 2025!

In an ongoing collaboration between the Moffitt-Caspi Lab and the Hariri Lab, we are recruiting a new PhD trainee and a new postdoctoral fellow beginning fall of 2025. We seek trainees who have a specific interest in midlife brain aging, its origins in early life, and its implications for mental and physical health in later life. The research training will be grounded in the ongoing longitudinal Dunedin Study, which has followed a population-representative birth cohort for six decades. We collected a first wave of MRI data in 875 Study members when they were 45 years old and are currently collecting a second wave of data as Study members turn 52 years old this year. We expect the second wave of data collection to be ready for analysis by fall semester 2025. This will lead to many opportunities to map individual life histories (e.g., childhood adversity, environmental exposures, history of mental illness) onto changes in midlife brain structure and, furthermore, to map these changes onto a number of health outcomes including risk for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The research training will also afford opportunities to extend findings from the Dunedin Study through other MRI datasets including those collected through ADNI, UK Biobank, BrainLat, and ENIGMA.

The trainee will be collectively supervised by Ahmad Hariri, Avshalom Caspi, and Temi Moffitt. Applications for the PhD program may be submitted through either the Clinical Psychology training area or the Cognition & the Brain training area in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, as well as the Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program. Applications for Postdoc training can be submitted through a number of T32 Training Grant programs in the Duke Medical School. Ideal candidates will have existing research experience with MRI data analysis including a strong background in programming. Please contact us to discuss your application.

Research Focus
The Laboratory of NeuroGenetics (LoNG) at Duke University employs a research strategy seeking to integrate complimentary approaches in the service of identifying biomarkers of risk for common forms of mental illness and unhealthy aging. The LoNG works with collaborators both at Duke and abroad to translate these efforts into the next generation of strategies for intervention and prevention.

Studies
Duke Neurogenetics Study
Dunedin Brain Imaging Study

For a list of current collaborative projects and instructions on submitting a new data sharing proposal, please see our Data Sharing page.