Considering joining the SCANN Lab?

Fantastic! We’re always looking for talented new members of the lab! If you have questions about who we are and what we do, one place to start would be the lab manual.

Prospective Graduate Students

Dr. Weisberg is not recruiting graduate student for the 2024 cycle.

If you’re considering getting a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and are interested in working in the SCANN Lab in future cycles, please contact Dr. Weisberg via email.

Please see the following Q&A for information about whether and how to apply. (Adapted from Maureen Ritchey’s lab website with permission).

Is the SCANN Lab right for me?

Evaluate the scientific fit: Read through some of our recent papers. Do the questions seem interesting, engaging, and like those you’d want to spend time thinking about? Do the methods we use appeal to you and fit with your planned career trajectory?

For mentoring fit: Read through our lab manual, which outlines my expectations for trainees and for myself as a mentor. Can you see yourself succeeding in an environment like the one described? The SCANN Lab emphasizes team science, collaboration, open science and open data, and healthy work-life balance. My goal is for trainees to leave the SCANN Lab with marketable skills and research products demonstrating those skills; preparing them for careers in or out of academia. If you are invited to interview with our lab, I encourage you to talk with the other trainees and see what their experiences have been.

How do I apply?

Specific application instructions can be found here. The University of Florida Psychology department has waived the GRE requirement.

The Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience program uses a lab-based admissions process. Each student applies to work with a particular professor. If you wish to work with me, I will be the one who is primarily reviewing your application. Be sure to list my name on your application. You can list other professors as well, but this is not required. If you do list other professors, make clear who you want to be your primary mentor. In some cases, a grad student can be co-mentored by two professors. If this is something that you’re interested in and if it makes sense for your research interests, you should include this in your application.

Please email me before submitting your application to introduce yourself. I will likely respond by pointing you back to this post, the SCANN Lab website, and our lab manual. If you have specific questions about the application or process, please ask. I do not typically hold Zoom meetings with applicants until after I’ve reviewed applications. If you choose to email me before submitting your application, please include your resume or CV and a paragraph about your research interests and why you want to apply to my lab (see section below). If it is apparent the research fit is questionable, I will tell you, and then it’s up to you whether to submit an application.

Once I have reviewed the applications, I will contact a short list of applicants for Zoom interviews. An even shorter list will be invited to interview on campus early in the spring semester.

What will make my application stand out?

When I review applications, I pay most attention to three things: 1) the research fit and 2) demonstration of research-related skills and abilities, and 3) critical and creative thinking. I realize that not everyone may have the opportunity to participate in research opportunities prior to obtaining a PhD. But before embarking on a 4-5 year long journey, it is imperative that applicants have thought through why they work in the SCANN Lab (addressing #1); what relevant skills and experience they have that will help them succeed (addressing #2); and that they have the capacity for thinking about deep and hard problems (addressing #3). Most of this can be communicated through the personal statement, although the other pieces of the application provide supporting evidence (especially letters of recommendation or research products – posters, talks, in prep manuscripts, code repositories or code samples).

For research fit, I do not expect you to have research experience that is directly related to our lab’s work, nor do you need to have a specific plan for what kinds of experiments you want to run. But you should be able to express interest in questions or topics that are one or two degrees more specific than “the neuroscience of spatial navigation.”

For research-related skills, I am looking for candidates who have demonstrated techniques in at least one area relevant to SCANN Lab research. This could be testing human subjects; writing computer code; working with virtual environments; analyzing data; or designing stimuli. If you do not have the opportunity to work in a lab to build some of these skills, I would encourage you to pursue self-driven forms of learning (an online course in coding or fMRI analysis) and include these in your application or CV. Partly, this is because PhD applicants should be able to demonstrate a commitment to research before applying, including having built up some of the necessary skill set.

For critical and creative thinking, I am looking for evidence that you care about an area of research and start to understand how you think about it. If you can relate a topic that you care about to existing scientific research, that’s a great sign. I want to know why you’ve decided that cognitive neuroscience is the field for you.  I want to get a feel for the ideas, techniques, and topics that spark your curiosity.

What types of research projects are you planning for the future?

Our main projects all focus around spatial navigation, but this is a wide net. We are conducting behavioral and fMRI experiments, using virtual reality and desktop tasks. We have projects related to individual differences, navigation training, and aging/Alzheimer’s disease. I am also always open to new collaborations (though these depend very specifically on the research fit) and re-analysis of existing datasets.

Prospective Undergraduate Students

If you’re an undergraduate at the University of Florida who majors in Psychology, Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, or other related fields, you can submit an application here. (Dr. Weisberg considers applications once at the beginning of each academic semester). Feel free to drop him an email to let him know you’ve applied, but you may not hear back.

Things to highlight in your application would include any experience with computer coding, data analysis, or running subjects (either clinical patients or older adults is a plus).