Post-Doctoral position - Department of Linguistics, Natural Language Processing for Understanding Pragmatic and Social Language in Autism and Fragile X Syndrome

Postdoc in Natural Language Processing for Understanding Pragmatic and Social Language in Autism and Fragile X Syndrome

(Davis, CA, USA)

The Linguistics Department at the University of California, Davis announces a one-year postdoctoral fellowship starting as early as January 1, 2026 (but this date is flexible), with the potential for renewal for a second year.

The postdoc would join an ongoing NIH-funded project on using NLP, LLMs, dialogue, and speech processing to analyze clinical language data in order to better understand pragmatic and social language difficulties in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and Fragile X syndrome (FXS) and potential genetic contributors. The postdoc would be mentored by Rob Voigt and be part of a large interdisciplinary team at UC Davis and Northwestern University including Co-PI Molly Losh. The team includes researchers in NLP, linguistics, and communication sciences and disorders with deep technical and domain expertise, and works collaboratively across the UC Davis Linguistic Mechanisms Lab (Voigt) and the Northwestern Neurodevelopmental Disabilities Lab (Losh). Together these are fun, supportive, and collaborative groups providing many opportunities for learning, hands-on research and teamwork.

Candidates should have a PhD in Linguistics, Computer Science, or a related field with a strong technical background in NLP and LLMs. Interest and/or experience in working with dialogue, speech, or clinical data are preferred, as is theoretical background in pragmatics or sociolinguistics. A significant portion of the project includes multilingual comparisons between English and Mandarin Chinese, so fluency in Mandarin or with multilingual computational modelling are significant benefits as well. The project encompasses a wide variety of research areas and methods, including modeling conversational interaction and dialogue structure, developing metrics for pragmatic and social language understanding, cross-lingual comparison, and could also include speech processing.

Review of applications will begin November 19 and continue until the position is filled.

We expect to get back to applicants in mid-December 2026.

* PhD in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, or a related field

* A PhD is required to start the position but not required at time of application.

* Excellent research track record.

* Excellent writing skills and oral communication skills.

* Strong programming skills.

* Experience in computational and statistical methods and analyses, particularly in NLP and large language models.

* A track record of independent initiative in research.

* Experience with linguistic pragmatics, and/or multilingual computational modeling.

* Experience in mentoring.

* Demonstrated interest in clinical applications of computational methods.

* Fluency in Mandarin Chinese.

• 3-5 required (contact information only)

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