Sydney Levine - Open Positions

Graduate Students (PhD program)

I will be accepting PhD students through the NYU psychology department for the current application cycle (for admission in Fall 2026). My lab is joint between the Cognition & Perception area and the Social & Personality area, so interested applicants are invited to apply to whichever area fits their broader interests. If you are interested in joining my lab, please mention my name in your application. The central focus of the lab will be studying the computational basis of human moral judgment. In addition, I am particularly looking for students with strong computational backgrounds, training in philosophy, and curiosity or passion about AI safety.

Summer Research Position (no longer accepting applications)

I am seeking a part-time or full-time researcher for the summer (starting asap) to bring a project to completion. The project asks the question: do people around the world use similar cognitive mechanisms to reason about norms and norm violations? Using the paradigm developed in this paper, and in collaboration with Nori Jacoby, we have developed a study that investigates how people around the world make judgments about the permissibility of cutting in line. We have developed the cross-cultural paradigm and gathered a small pilot sample in 7 languages/cultures. We are looking for someone to help dig into and analyze the data, think about data quality issues in different cultures, help refine the paradigm, and help us launch this study to 50 languages. We already have the computational and technical infrastructure set up to deploy the experiment internationally, so the researcher we hire will interface with the technical team that supports that pipeline. Optionally, the researcher could choose to learn how to use this pipeline themselves, if they are interested in doing future work on large-scale cross-cultural studies. In addition (and also optionally), the researcher could help expand the computational model that predicts human judgments in these tasks (see the paper linked above for details).

Qualifications: Position is best suited for someone who has strong data analysis skills (especially with human data) and an interest in computational social cognition. Most likely, it is best suited for someone who has completed a master's program (e.g. statistics, psychology, cognitive science, etc.) or is enrolled in a PhD program or post-PhD. The scope of the project can be expanded or contracted based on experience and interests.

Pay rate: At least $4k/month for someone working full-time (negotiable based on experience)

Location: Position could be based in Cambridge, MA, NYC, or remote.

To apply: Please send a CV and a short statement of interest to sydney.levine@gmail.com with the subject line "Summer Research Position Application". Please explain why you are interested in this role, your relevant qualifications, and your availability for the summer.

Postdoc Position (no longer accepting applications)

I will be starting a lab at NYU in Spring 2026 which will focus on the computational basis of moral cognition and drawing on the cognitive science of human morality to make AI systems safer. The lab will be housed in the NYU Psychology Department and bridge across the social and cognitive areas (and ideally make connections to the philosophy and CS departments as well). I'm currently recruiting a postdoc to start in the summer or sooner.

This position is ideal for somebody with a strong computational background (e.g. computer science or computationally-intensive cognitive science PhD) who is interested in the intersection of the cognitive science of human moral judgment and AI safety. The research agenda you will be part of over the next year+ will involve building models, running experiments, and testing theories related to how humans make moral judgments and how insights from human moral cognition can be used to develop AI systems that are aligned to the plurality of diverse human values.

In particular, we are asking a series of questions about how “resource-rational contractualism” can help explain the flexibility of moral rules. We are also running large-scale, data collection projects for the purposes of AI alignment and attempting to engineer AI systems that learn and abide by human moral norms. The ultimate goal of our work is to simultaneously study and understand the human moral mind as well as use our unique skills and knowledge to contribute to the building and study of AI systems at an incredibly important time in the history of this technology.

Those with interests or background in philosophy, game theory, mechanism design, cooperative AI, and/or the study and development of language models are particularly encouraged to apply and should highlight this in their application.