Two PhD positions in Psychology

The successful applicants will closely collaborate within this larger project with each other as well as with a team of researchers from psychology and biology, as well as partners from within the consortium. Research participants will be children, adolescents, and care takers. The research will take place in residential care homes, day care facilities, and schools in Luxembourg.

We are offering 2 PhD positions: one in Developmental Psychology and one in Psychobiology. Both positions are embedded respectively in the following two research groups and will be supervised by a joint team from those two groups:

The Cognitive and Socio-Emotional Development research group (Supervisor and Lab leader: Prof. Dr. Pascale Engel de Abreu). This PhD project will longitudinally explore executive functions in children with and without care-experience, with the aim to identify cognitive risk markers of language learning difficulties and poor mental health in children who experienced early adversity and trauma. Research methods will include interviews and questionnaires with parents and residential care workers, as well as experimental and standardized tests with children and statistical analyses of the data.

The Stress, Pain, and Gene-Environment Interplay research group (Supervisor and Lab leader: Prof. Dr. Robert Kumsta). This PhD project will focus on epigenetic markers of exposure to early adversity. It will address the question whether biological marks of early adversity and trauma are observable in care-experienced children and whether epigenetic marks are linked to specific subtypes of early adversity and trauma. Methods used include behavioural testing of children and adolescents, DNA methylation analysis, “epigenetic clock” analysis and investigation of inflammation-related polyepigenetic scores.

Responsibilities

• Complete a doctoral thesis in Psychology
• Acquire in-depth knowledge in the respective fields of research through literature research, training programmes, exchanges with team members, and internal CHAMP team meetings
• Contribute to the development of methods and materials
• Assess children and work with care takers
• Collect, manage, and analyse quantitative data
• Effectively collaborate with all project partners
• Work closely with stakeholders including third-party and contracting partners to coordinate the study and facilitate communication with all involved parties
• Attend and present research findings at national and international conferences including academic and non-academic audiences
• Publish scientific articles in peer-reviewed international journals