"Postdoc Position: CMT Patients’ Use of Audiovisual Information While Listening"

Job Description

Join an international research project exploring how Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease affects listening in real-life conversations. As a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University, you will study audiovisual speech perception, collaborate with global partners, and contribute to advancing knowledge with societal impact.

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher for the NWO Open Competition M project 'Hidden Hearing and Speech Deficits in Patients with Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease'. Hearing ability is indispensable in our society. For patients with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (nerve disease in the peripheral nerves), this skill is less obvious. They appear to be less able to hear the order of speech sounds and pitch and to understand clearly spoken sentences with background noise. It is unclear whether listeners with CMT also have more difficulty listening to natural conversation when they can not only hear but also see the speaker.

The project is part of an international consortium of Radboud University, Amsterdam UMC, University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA) and the University of Melbourne (Australia). You will work at Radboud University. Within this subproject, you will study to what extent (and how and why) CMT affects listening to spontaneous conversations in an audiovisual context.

You will be involved in designing, conducting, analysing and disseminating the research. The research will be conducted partly at the BSI lab and partly at patients’ homes, with facilities for various research methods (including spatialised listening and phoneme discrimination).

The research focuses on adolescents and adults with CMT. You will formulate research questions and devise an appropriate method. You will analyse complex data, present the results at conferences, and publish in peer-reviewed journals. You will also be an active member of the BSI in Nijmegen.

Requirements

You have or are about to obtain a PhD in psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, or a related field.

You have an interest in audiovisual speech perception.

You have excellent interpersonal skills, and the ability to work independently and as part of a team.

You have experience in designing and conducting experiments.

You preferably have experience in project management.

You have experience with Praat (or Matlab/Python), and with using advanced statistical methods and writing code.

You preferably have experience with setting up and analysing spatialised listening experiments.

You have excellent oral and written skills in English.

Conditions of Employment

We will give you a temporary employment contract of 1 year.

Your salary within salary scale 11 depends on your previous education and number of years of (relevant) work experience. The amounts in the scale are based on a 38-hour working week.

You will receive an 8% holiday allowance and an 8.3% end-of-year bonus.

We offer Dual Career Coaching. The Dual Career Coaching assists your partner via support, tools, and resources to improve their chances of independently finding employment in the Netherlands.

You will receive extra days off. With full-time employment, you can choose between 30 or 41 days of annual leave instead of the statutory 20.

Additional employment conditions: Work and science require good employment practices. This is reflected in Radboud University's primary and secondary employment conditions. You can make arrangements for the best possible work-life balance with flexible working hours, various leave arrangements and working from home. You are also able to compose part of your employment conditions yourself, for example, exchange income for extra leave days and receive a reimbursement for your sports subscription. And of course, we offer a good pension plan. You are given plenty of room and responsibility to develop your talents and realise your ambitions. Therefore, we provide various training and development schemes.