Cognitive/Affective Research Scientist

Los Altos, CA     ·       Full Time

Company Information

Alto Neuroscience is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that integrates the biology of the patient into drug development to improve the lives of people with mental health conditions. Currently, there is no objective way to diagnose psychiatric illness, nor to identify which treatment is best for an individual patient. Treatment selection is presently done by trial-and-error as there are no tests that can inform these decisions. Through our AI-enabled biomarker platform, we combine rich sources of information on patients’ brain activity and behavior to rapidly develop highly-effective medicines for targeted populations. We aim to replace today’s trial-and-error clinical approach by aligning the right Alto drug with the right patient, redefining psychiatry at a time when the world needs it most. Come join us on our mission to re-imagine and re-engineer the treatment of mental illnesses!

Job Description

We are looking for a cognitive research scientist with a neuroscience, psychology or other behavioral background. A solid foundation with psychometric testing is highly desirable, with a working knowledge of task development, validation, norming and derivation of composite scores. A good candidate will also have data wrangling skills in R or Python to deal with a variety of datasets and measurement modalities. Collaborating with our data science team, the candidate should be ready to interrogate our studies and public datasets to address key research questions.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Primary involvement in quality control, evaluation, feature generation and statistical analysis of cognitive task data
• Elucidate and communicate the brain / behavioral underpinnings of derived findings
• Hypothesis generation and analysis using public datasets

Skills and Qualifications

• MS or Ph.D. in psychology, neuroscience, biostatistics, statistics, or related field
• 3-5 years of experience analyzing cognitive assessment, personality or clinical data.
• Experience with statistical programming languages, e.g. R or Python
• Excellent communication skills
• Eager to thrive in a startup environment

Experience with cognitive testing

• Identifying between cognitive tasks for assessment of attention, memory, and cognitive control
• Assessing measures of task integrity including test-retest reliability and task validity (trial-level and subject-level variability; construct validity)
• Assessing trial-level data in various ways including statistical modeling and machine learning
• Pairing tasks with self-report assessments to assay various clinical and non-clinical phenotypes
• Administration of remote task data collection

Preferred Skills and Qualifications

• Academic exposure to psychology / behavioral neuroscience
• Experience with RCT data

Please click here to apply.