Doctoral Position at Southern Miss in Memory Malleability Research

[L.Patihis@usm.edu]

Professor Lawrence Patihis at the University of Southern Mississippi am able to take one more doctoral graduate student. Once he takes this graduate student he will not be taking another for another 4 years, so this is a limited time offer. Deadline is March 1st, 2017.  Start date is August 15th 2017.

 

He welcomes applications from high achieving students. Doctoral programs are demanding, as is the job market, and the jobs themselves, so ideally applicants should really like memory distortion research, have a GPA above 3.5, and high GREs. Very high achieving bachelors applicants or those with masters degrees would be ideal for our short 4 year program because by the time of the final year they will be well developed and ready for the job market and post docs.

 

Southern Miss Psychology Department is ranked around 170 in the United States by US News, and is designated as the center of excellence for psychology in Mississippi. We have top professors here who publish a lot. Last year, for example, our psychology professors published in many top journals (e.g. Psych Science). Due to the competition for doctoral programs, we also have outstanding graduate students here.

 

For the new graduate student Dr Patihis will probably get them started on a project investigating people's (public, practitioners, etc) beliefs about memory and dissociation (essentially a follow-up to Patihis et al., 2014, in Psychological Science, though investigating new questions). In addition, they will also investigate groundbreaking research on the malleability of memory.

Applicants career goals should be academia, research, teaching, government, or industry (NOT clinician--this is a scientific experimental program without training in practice or therapy). Those who love science, memory research, scientific skepticism (e.g., fans of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Scott Lilienfeld, etc), and statistics would be best suited.

 

The doctoral program involves being a teaching assistant for 20 hours a week and in return tuition is paid and a small yearly stipend is given to cover some living expenses. As well as teaching assisting, graduate students do research, as well as take classes.  Average weekly combined time grading, teaching, classes, and researching is about 48 hours.

 

The research is groundbreaking, and although there are some schools with higher stipends out there, there are also a lot of more expensive programs out there.

 

More details:

http://lpatihis.wixsite.com/memorylab/phd-student-opening