Contact Us

General Inquiries

To contact us, email Emily or Rebecca, or call the lab at 617.324.2891.

Join the Lab

We often have open positions for undergraduate research assistants from MIT and Wellesley (UROP). And once every year or two, we hire a new technical assistant or lab manager, a new graduate student, and a new post-doc. To work in our lab, you will need curiosity and commitment. A lot of the research we do requires computer skills, especially coding (e.g. MATLAB or python) and statistics (e.g. SPSS or R). We also need help doing outreach and education for families and communities.

  • Lab Tech/Lab Manager: We are not currently looking for a lab tech/manager. 
  • UROPs: UROPs work for credit for their first semester in the lab while they are mostly being trained. Many of our long-term UROPs are funded by either the UROP office or our grants. UROPs who stay in the lab more than two semesters often get to play significant roles in research projects, and some have earned authorship on published papers. We usually recruit new UROPs starting about one month before the new semester (Fall, Spring, or Summer). You can find more information about UROP, including eligibility, here: https://urop.mit.edu/). Please reach out to Emily if you have questions about positions in the lab.    
  • Post-baccalaureate students: we accept post-bac students (a two year program prior to PhD applications) through the Post-baccalaureate Research Scholars Program in Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
  • Graduate students: Potential graduate students should apply through the BCS graduate program application. We may have an opening for a Graduate student in the 2022 or 2023 cohort. BCS graduate students starting in Fall 2022 should contact Prof Saxe about a possible rotation. Students applying for admission to BCS for Fall 2023 may list Prof Saxe as a possible mentor.
  • Post-doctoral positions: We may have 1-2 openings for postdocs to start in July 2023 or later. Potential post-docs should apply to our ad here: https://bit.ly/saxelab-postdoc-ad. We will begin reviewing submissions on December 19, 2022. 

Current Research Projects

We have several projects going on in the lab led by our fabulous lab members. These projects cover a wide range of topics and methods. 

The papers and posters presented from our lab at the 2022 Cognitive Science Society conference provide a good overview of current projects.

  1. Validating child-friendly neuroimaging language localizer in adults
  2. Using fMRI to study the neural basis of violation-of-expectation
  3. Face-preferring regions in FFA, STS, and MPFC have different functions
  4. Habituation reflects optimal exploration over noisy perceptual samples
  5. Modeling risky food sharing as rational communication about relationships
  6. Modeling punishment as a rational communicative social action
  7. Reasoning about the antecedents of emotions: Bayesian causal inference over an intuitive theory of mind

Please note that Prof Saxe is not currently planning any new projects about Autism or false belief tasks.

Participate

Are you interested in getting your brain scanned? Check out the department mailing list and watch this video to learn how an fMRI study session would go (credit to the Fedorenko Lab). 

Participate in our research by being a subject! Participating as a subject is a great way to learn about Saxelab research and even earn a little money on the side. The average payment is about $30/hour. Please e-mail Emily if you are interested in becoming a Saxelab participant. You can also learn more about participating as a subject in other MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences studies here.

Where are we?

We are located in the Brain & Cognitive Sciences department on the MIT campus, room 4021 in building 46.

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