RECRUITING NEW Postdoc for fall 2025!

In a longstanding collaboration between the Moffitt-Caspi Team and the Hariri Lab, we are recruiting new postdoctoral fellows for fall 2025. We seek trainees who have a specific interest in midlife aging, its origins in early life, and its implications for mental and physical health in later life. The training positions are based at Duke University and are funded by the National Institute on Aging. The research training will be grounded in the ongoing longitudinal Dunedin Study at the University of Otago, which has followed a population-representative birth cohort of New Zealanders for six decades. We are currently collecting a new wave of rich multidisciplinary data from the participants at age 52. We are looking for two postdoctoral fellows. One will study aging and health using life-course longitudinal methods and another will study brain aging using neuropsychological and imaging methods. 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, cognitive changes, epigenetic aging measures, and risk markers for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The research training will also afford opportunities to extend findings through other datasets, including HRS, ADNI, UK Biobank, BrainLat, and ENIGMA, as well as to nationwide health register studies.

Trainees will join a friendly team of scientific staff, PhD students, and postdocs and will be collectively supervised by Avshalom Caspi, Ahmad Hariri, and Terrie Moffitt. Our team has a great training track record: We won Duke’s Postdoctoral Mentor Award, and have produced 6 APS Rising Star Awardees. Applications for Postdoc training can be submitted through a number of T32 Training Grant programs in the Duke Medical School, in aging and in psychiatry. Ideal candidates will have existing research experience in multivariate statistics, genomics, and/or MRI data analysis and a strong background in programming. Contact us soon 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.