Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Evolution over Deep Time

Overview

The School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cognitive Evolution over Deep Time. The post is full time at 35 hours per week and fixed term from January 2027 until 31 December 2028, on site in Edinburgh. It belongs to the Deep Time Cognition team, funded by the Swedish Research Council, which combines cognitive zoology, neurobiology and palaeontology to study how brains and cognition evolved together over very long timescales and what drove that evolution.

The team is building an initial atlas of how neuroanatomy correlates with cognition expressed in behaviour, and will use the results to reconstruct the cognition of long-extinct species through brain models based on fossils. This will allow cognitive changes in geological time to be linked to major events in Earth's history. The Edinburgh part of the team specialises in palaeontology and phylogenetics, contributing CT scans of fossils, reconstructions of extinct brains and large phylogenetic datasets.

What you will do

The postdoctoral fellow is a key member of the team and gathers and synthesises data on the anatomy, size and shape of brains, from CT brain endocasts, for tetrapods across more than 350 million years of evolution. They work with the Edinburgh lead, PhD students and an external co-investigator at Ohio University who have collected data on dinosaurs, squamates and amphibians. The fellow uses Bayesian statistics to test for trends in brain size over time and across the family tree, tests for correlations between brain size and neuron counts in living species, and makes robust predictions of neuron counts in extinct species, including Tyrannosaurus rex, contributing to a live debate in cognitive zoology and palaeontology.

What you get

The salary is 41,064 to 48,822 GBP per year at Grade 7.

Key dates

The closing date is 23 October 2026.