Five-year Postdoctoral Position on Bayes Factor Hypothesis Testing in Factorial Designs

Do you have a PhD on the topic of Bayes factor hypothesis testing? The Psychological Methods Unit at the University of Amsterdam offers a five-year postdoctoral position on the ERC Advanced project “Coherent Hypothesis Tests for Experimental Research” awarded to Prof. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers.

Postdoc
The five-year postdoctoral position is part of a larger team that seeks to develop, assess, and promote Bayes factor hypothesis tests in factorial designs.

What are you going to do
The envisioned projects will focus on the following activities related to Bayesian inference in factorial designs:

1. Construction and elicitation of informed prior distributions;
2. Critical assessment of default prior distributions;
3. Organizing a many-statisticians challenge and workshop;
4. Studying model-averaging, effect size estimation, and tests for interactions;
5. Designing methods to overcome numerical challenges.

What do you have to offer
You have a PhD in a topic that involved Bayes factor hypothesis testing. You can collaborate well with software engineers, students, psychologists, and statisticians. You are highly proficient in English writing. You have extensive experience in R programming.

What else do we offer you
This is a temporary employment contract for 38 hours per week, for the duration of 5 years.

Depending on relevant work experience, the salary amounts to a minimum of €4,728 and a maximum of €6,433 gross per month (scale 11) based on full-time working hours (38 hours per week), excluding 8% vacation allowance and 8.3% end-of-year bonus. The Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities is applicable. In addition, we offer an extensive package of secondary employment conditions, including a generous vacation scheme and year-end bonus, and we believe it is important that you continue to develop and professionalize yourself. To this end, we offer excellent study and development.

You will work here
You will join the Psychological Methods group, which provides ample opportunity for collaboration and exchange of ideas. Within the Psychological Methods group, you will work in the team of EJ Wagenmakers. One of the main goals of this team is to develop and promote Bayesian inference (and in particular Bayes factor hypothesis testing), and lower the bar for field-wide adoption by implementing the Bayesian methodology in JASP (www.jasp-stats.org).

If you recognize yourself in this profile and are interested in the role, we look forward to receiving your motivation letter and CV. You can apply via the red button until 19 October 2025. Interviews will take place in the two weeks after this closing date. In case of equal qualifications, internal candidates will be given preference over external candidates.

For questions about the vacancy, you can contact EJ Wagenmakers (E.M.Wagenmakers@uva.nl).