Our policy of recruiting new members

New (updated on Oct 20, 2021) 

Our policy of recruiting new members (prospective PhD candidates and postdocs) 

We believe that it’s important to have a “get-to-know” period (like an internship period) before we make decision on whether to work with you. 

During the friends period, we ask you to work with us on one project. This can be a summer/winter intern project. It can be a research unit in your university, where I serve as a co-supervisor. Or a new collaborative project with your current supervisor. It may be with / without contract and would last for a couple of months or up to one year, depending on the cases. 

From our end, we want to see several aspects in you that we think are critical. We want to see if you fit with us.

TIPS

Techniques: This includes various knowledge and skills. These are the things difficult to glance from your CV. For example, we want to see if you can program in the way that everyone can understand. We want codes that are easy to debug. We don’t need any complex and clever codes for our projects.

Intelligence: We care your intelligence in various domains. This includes communications skills and mindsets. Can you communicate effectively with others using various tools? Can you plan projects taking into account of rest and failure? Can you manage yourself? Do you strive to beat yourself yesterday? 

Personality: We want to make sure if your personality fits with the existing members. We want to become friends before collaborators! 

Speed: We want to see if you can adapt and grow speedily. When you receive feedback and suggestions, do you react quickly? Can you improve the projects and yourselves? 

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During the friends period, you can also test us, and in particular, see if you like with working with me. I know that this is quite unusual kind of laboratory. But I hope this makes sense to both of us. We are striving to make our lab happier and more productive lab! 

Procedure:

We are not urgently and actively recruiting postdocs or PhD candidates at the moment. But, if you are interested in working with us in the future, please send your CV.  Depending on the project and availability of the lab members, we may offer you the friends period.

Projects: 

Please see this page on our Research Statement. 

As described , we are interested in people who share the goal with us. To address the problem of consciousness. Any background is welcomed. In particular,  mathematics (especially category theory), physics (especially quantum physics, quantum information), and linguistics (especially cognitive linguistic – how much of what we experience is influenced by our language?).  But these are neither necessary nor sufficient. 

Most projects in the friends periods are either online psychophysics or data analysis. But it can be a theoretical project. Data analysis projects require substantial programming skills. We tend to work with Python, Matlab, R or other language.