Postdoctoral fellow position

 We seek a post-doctoral fellow who has specialized experience in the collection and analysis of diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) of white matter circuitry in infants. The fellow will contribute to a longitudinal study of language development in preterm infants, born before 32 weeks’ gestation, over the first 18 months of life. The infants live in predominantly English- or predominantly Spanish-speaking households. The study considers how characteristics of white matter pathways at birth and the development of these pathways over the first year of life contribute to standardized and novel, experimental language outcomes. The study simultaneously considers contributions of the social environment to language development, assessed through analysis of child-directed speech from day-long audio recordings in the home and from caregiver-child interactions observed in the laboratory. The study considers the moderating influences of maternal mental health and familial stress on the social environment. This project will provide unprecedented access to an existing rich dMRI dataset of preterm infants and to new data collected on an ongoing basis as part of this project.  The post-doctoral fellow will have opportunities to guide data collection and analysis around novel questions.