Join Us
Prospective Postdoctoral Fellows
Professor Ullman will be reviewing Ph.D. applications for the Summer/Fall 2025 application cycle. Please apply through Harvard Psychology with this applicant link. Candidates with Ph.D. in Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognitive Developmental, or a related field are encouraged to apply by March 30, 2025.
Prospective Ph.D. Students
Professor Ullman is likely not going to be reviewing Ph.D. applications for the Fall 2025 application cycle. Students nevertheless interested in the department are encouraged to apply through Harvard Psychology here. Generally speaking, students with a background in psychology, cognitive science, computer science, math, physics, and related fields are encouraged to apply.
Prospective Undergraduate Research Assistants
The CoCoDev Lab is always on the lookout for undergraduate students to join our lab as research assistants!
Harvard College Students should enroll for Spring Psychology Research Course (PSY 2362R).
Non-class credit research opportunities are available as well.
Please reach out to Professor Ullman with your CV and why you're interested pursuing a particular project to be considered for the position.
Past examples of research projects
Object Representation
We are interested in how people represent objects differently when they're tracking them physically (say, to grab them) vs. to recognize them visually. In particular, this project examines the early development of this difference.
Photo Credit: Verity Pinter
Play
What does it mean to have fun? We have collected video data of children ages 5-10 years playing with toys under different instructions: Do whatever you want, Try to have fun, Learn as much as you can. Next steps are to categorize children’s actions and test specific hypotheses about decision-making and learning. For example, do children at pursue more diverse goals when trying to have fun than when trying to learn? How might learning outcomes differ across conditions? What kinds of developmental change might we observe?
Creative Problem-Solving
How do children generate hypotheses for novel problems? We designed some brainteasers for 3-5-year-old children and will run a series of online experiments this Spring. The primary question is whether repeated exposure to such problems can support “out of the box thinking”, and how this effect might generalize across different kinds of problem.