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Graduate students

The Computational Social Cognition lab will be accepting graduate students for Fall 2026. If you're interested in applying, please read this carefully, as it helps me identify the candidates who have taken the time to learn about our research.

To keep the process fair, I do not meet with prospective students before applications are submitted. I will carefully read all applications and then invite a small number of candidates for Zoom interviews. If you plan to apply, please read the lab's research page and at least one or two recent papers that reflect the lab's current direction (choose papers from the representative publications list or papers from the past two years).

Once you've done that, please send me a brief email that includes a few sentences about the kind of research you're interested in and how it connects to our work, a short note on your relevant background, and your CV. I encourage you to write this email in your own voice. It's much easier for me to get a sense of your interests that way than from a generic email. At this stage, just tell me what you're excited about. You can talk about building on something the labs done or proposing a new direction. I don't expect you to have a fully formed idea. What I value most is evidence that you've thought critically about our work rather than statements that allude to fit ina broad way or mention paper titles without showing me you've really engaged with them.

I try to respond to every inquiry, but emails that don't follow these guidelines are less likely to get a response. Applications should be submitted directly to Yale's psychology department and are due on December 1st, 2025. You can find more information about our admissions here.

Undergraduate students

We often looking for motivated undergraduates that are interested in developmental or computational research. Research assistants will have the opportunity to be involved in all aspects of the research process, including recruiting participants, running experiments, collecting and entering data, analyzing data, and presenting results.

Requirements:

• Minimum commitment of 6 hours/week
• For developmental research, must be available for blocks of time during the weekend or weekday to collect data, and comfortable interacting with children 4-10 years of age.
• For computational research, strong programming experience is required.

We are particularly interested in RAs who can commit for at least two semesters or more.

To apply, please send your resume/CV to Alina Dau at alina.dau@yale.edu.