Postdoctoral Researcher in Human Stress, Motivation and Translational Biomarkers

EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, is one of the most dynamic university campuses in Europe and ranks among the top 20 universities worldwide. The EPFL employs more than 6,500 people supporting the three main missions of the institutions: education, research and innovation.

Mission

Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)-funded project on human motivation, stress physiology, immersive behavioral testing, and biological phenotyping. The Laboratory of Behavioral Genetics at EPFL, led by Prof. Carmen Sandi, is seeking an outstanding postdoctoral researcher with a strong technical and quantitative profile to join a SNSF-funded project investigating human motivation and stress responsiveness.

The project will develop and validate individually calibrated behavioral tasks in immersive virtual reality (VR) to quantify effort-based motivation, vigor, persistence, and goal-directed versus habitual control. It will then test how acute stress alters these processes, combining behavioral performance, physiological monitoring, movement-based phenotyping, and advanced statistical and computational analyses.

Project background

Understanding how stress influences motivated behavior requires experimental approaches that combine rigorous behavioral testing with careful assessment of individual differences and biological stress responses. In this project, participants will complete immersive behavioral tasks designed to measure how they choose, initiate action, sustain effort, adapt to changing contingencies, and respond to acute stress.

Main responsibilities

The postdoctoral researcher will lead the human experimental and translational phenotyping arm of the project. Responsibilities will include:

• Coordinating participant recruitment, screening, scheduling, consent, testing, and retention.
• Implementing the human experimental protocol with high fidelity, including acute stress and neutral control sessions, VR-based behavioral tasks, questionnaires, physiological recordings, and biological sampling.
• Developing and maintaining standard operating procedures for participant flow, stress testing, biological sample collection, sample processing, data tracking, and quality control.
• Training and supervising Master’s students, research assistants, or junior lab members involved in recruitment, participant testing, biological sample handling, and data entry.
• Overseeing saliva collection, processing, labeling, storage, and coordination of endocrine assays, particularly cortisol.
• Contributing to the possible extension of the project toward blood-based hormonal, metabolic, inflammatory, or mitochondrial-related biomarkers.
• Ensuring high-quality participant-facing implementation, including participant safety, protocol adherence, management of pre-visit restrictions, timing of biological samples, and standardized administration of questionnaires and tasks.
• Working closely with the complementary postdoctoral researcher to align biological, physiological, behavioral, and movement-based data streams.
• Contributing to ethics submissions, amendments, participant-facing documents, laboratory manuals, data-management procedures, and open-science deliverables.
• Analyzing and interpreting relationships among stress exposure, anxiety-related traits, endocrine and physiological responses, and motivated behavior.
• Preparing reports as well as manuscripts for publication in top scientific journals and presenting findings at relevant conferences.

Candidate profile

Applicants should have a PhD in psychology, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, affective neuroscience, biological psychology, psychoneuroendocrinology, clinical neuroscience, translational psychiatry, human physiology, or a related discipline.

Essential qualifications include:

• Experience designing, coordinating, or running human experimental studies.
• Strong interest and expertise in stress, motivation, anxiety, affective neuroscience, reward, effort-based behavior, individual differences, or related domains.
• Experience with biological sampling in human participants, preferably saliva and/or blood.
• Familiarity with psychophysiological measures such as heart rate, heart-rate variability, electrodermal activity, respiration, or related indices.
• Knowledge of stress-related biomarkers, particularly cortisol, and ideally additional endocrine, metabolic, inflammatory, or mitochondrial-related measures.
• Experience with validated questionnaires and behavioral phenotyping in humans.
• Strong ability to manage participant recruitment, scheduling, screening, consent, protocol adherence, and study logistics.
• Ability to train and supervise students or research assistants involved in data collection.
• Good statistical literacy and ability to analyze behavioral, questionnaire, physiological, or biomarker data.
• Excellent attention to detail, documentation skills, and ability to maintain rigorous sample and data-tracking procedures.
• Strong scientific writing skills and motivation to contribute to high-quality publications.

Prior VR experience

Prior experience with virtual reality is welcome but not required. The successful candidate is not expected to be the main VR programmer or technical systems developer.

Additional strengths

Additional assets include experience with acute stress protocols such as the Trier Social Stress Test or related paradigms; saliva cortisol sampling; blood collection and processing; Biopac or comparable physiological acquisition systems; ELISA or immunoassay coordination; hormonal assays; metabolic or inflammatory biomarkers; mitochondrial-related peripheral measures; biobanking procedures; ethics submissions; longitudinal or large-scale human studies; and reproducible data-management practices.

Scientific environment

The successful candidate will join the Laboratory of Behavioral Genetics at EPFL, an interdisciplinary environment focused on the biological, behavioral, and individual-difference mechanisms of stress, motivation, anxiety, and resilience.

Application procedure

Interested candidates should send a single PDF file including:

• A cover letter describing their research background, technical and quantitative expertise, and fit for this position.
• A detailed CV, including a full list of publications.
• A brief research statement describing relevant previous work and methodological expertise.
• Contact details for three professional references.
• Optional but encouraged: examples of previous protocols, human-study coordination experience, biomarker work, analysis pipelines, or other outputs illustrating the candidate’s expertise.

Applications will start to be reviewed from June 15th 2026 and will continue being assessed on a rolling basis until the position is filled. For any further information, please contact Prof. Carmen Sandi (carmen.sandi@epfl.ch).

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