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Opportunities for prospective PhD students and undergraduate research assistants.

The DynamiCog Lab is actively recruiting PhD students and undergraduate research assistants. If the research here interests you, read below and reach out.

Prospective PhD Students

Nick recruits PhD students through the Natural Behavior and Computation (NBC) area of the UT Austin Department of Psychology graduate program. NBC is the department’s newest area. It studies behavior as people actually produce it (conversation, movement, language in real settings) and builds the computational methods needed to measure and model it. The lab’s work sits squarely inside that mission, so when you apply, list NBC as your area and name Nick as a potential advisor.

Applications open each fall. Before you apply, email Nick at nicholas.duran [at] utexas.edu with a few sentences about what you want to study and a CV. That conversation is the best way to tell whether the lab is a good fit.

Undergraduate Research Assistants

We regularly bring on undergraduate RAs to help run studies, work with behavioral and language data, and contribute to ongoing projects. No specific prior experience is required. Curiosity, reliability, and interest in the science matter most.

What we look for

Our work spans cognitive dynamics, communication, computational linguistics, and multimodal behavior. Comfort with (or willingness to learn) programming in Python or R is a plus for many projects, and we support students in building those skills.