Several opportunities are available for talented students, either currently at UNSW or planning to transfer here, to join and contribute to my research projects in Neurofinance. Some defined areas are outlined below; I am open to any form of contribution that spikes your interest.
Institutional arrangements are very flexible. You can choose to pick Neurofinance as the field of your academic assignments. Some activities are not suitable for an academic assignment, and will be done as fully paid Research Assistant activities (the salary is in fact quite good and of course it is a valued CV item if you want to pursue an academic career). This will be a case-by-case decision, depending on your profile and the academic path you are pursuing, but rest assured I won’t have you do “free work” for me ;-)
If you spot an interesting opportunity below, please send me an email with your interests, ideally a current CV, and we’ll fix an appointment to discuss further.
I am looking for contributions from people in many disciplines: Computer Sciences, Statistics, Mathematics, Neurosciences, Psychology, and these are just the main ones… So if you feel a potential interest in working with me, just send me an email to get an appointment and we’ll discuss.
Conducting an experiment in the ASB Lab.
- Responsibilities: includes contributing to the experimental design of a new money game, as part of one ongoing research project in behavioural finance; recruiting a population of qualified subjects as participants; preparing the relevant ethics committee materials; supervising some experimental sessions autonomously; participating in the data analysis.
- What you’ll gain: under my direct supervision, you will learn how to run an experimental project from A to Z. You will be involved and will contribute to all aspects of this experimental research project. Since I will work directly on this research project, the supervision will be very effective.
- Qualifications: you should be able to understand all aspects of the experimental task and to answer questions from the subjects during the experiment. Standard knowledge in statistics is also required for the data analysis. The job may be ideal for research students (Honours, MPhil, PhD) in finance, economics, or psychology, interested in pursuing research in behavioural finance. Students from other disciplines are also welcome to apply.
- Timeframe: right now the target schedule for this work is to start during Semester 2 2012, but this date is flexible.
Software Development: Experimental Task
- Responsibilities: includes coding a computerised money game on the basis of specifications I will give you. Suggestions to improve the basic specs, based on the objectives we want to achieve with the task, will be very welcome.
- What you’ll gain: You will first experience a complete software project cycle: you will receive the specifications, have to understand them by asking me clarifications, build mock-ups and prototypes, validate them, then build and deliver the final software. Since the task is a game, you will have the opportunity to strongly influence the UI and the software architecture itself (I will provide the algorithms to use for computations though). Understanding our scientific objectives and then proposing new software designs that beat our basic specs have proved to be greatly rewarding in the past :-)
- Qualifications: you should be able to code easily in Java or C++ (or a programming language of your choice that is cross-platform and able to perform as best), have an interest for UI design and of course a strong interest in behavioural sciences.
- Timeframe: right now the target schedule for this project is to start during Semester 2 2012, but this date is flexible.
