Preston Lab recruiting postdoctoral fellows
June 3, 2026
We’re excited to announce that the Preston Lab at UT Austin is recruiting 1–2 postdoctoral researchers to join our work investigating how people build structured knowledge from experience and use that knowledge to guide flexible behavior.
Our lab brings together questions about learning and memory across multiple domains, including space, time, associative learning, and naturalistic event understanding. Across these areas, we’re interested in the mechanisms that allow people to derive knowledge from experience, reason about the world, and make flexible decisions as their goals or environments change.
A major emphasis of our current work is using computational approaches, including AI-based models, to understand how knowledge is structured and deployed. We combine behavioral experiments, fMRI, computational modeling, and naturalistic stimuli to ask how prior experience shapes new learning, prediction, inference, and generalization.
Much of the lab’s research has a lifespan focus, including NIH-funded longitudinal studies of how memory representations change across adolescence and into emerging adulthood. At the same time, we are broadly interested in domain-general mechanisms of learning and memory that can be studied in healthy adults and older individuals.
We view the postdoctoral period as a time not only to deepen methodological and theoretical expertise but also to build the intellectual identity, collaborative network, and strategic skills that support an independent career. Postdocs will be encouraged to shape their own research directions within the lab’s broader themes, with mentorship around publishing, grant writing, collaboration, mentoring, and career development.
Candidates could come from cognitive neuroscience, psychology, developmental science, computational cognitive science, AI/ML-informed behavioral modeling, or related fields. Prior experience with all methods or populations is not expected; intellectual fit, methodological curiosity, and a strong commitment to rigorous science are most important.
Interested candidates should send a CV, statement of research interests, and the names of three references to Alison Preston at apreston@utexas.edu.
Questions are welcome by email.
Please share with candidates who may be excited about these questions and opportunities!
