Life After Chicago: Career Paths for Recent PhD Graduates

Over the last two years, eighteen graduate students received their PhDs from the Department. Our graduates are finding fulfilling employment opportunities both in and outside of academia. 

A number of our recent graduates have accepted faculty positions. Last summer, Zoe Liberman became an assistant professor at the University of California (Santa Barbara). Hiroki Kotabe is now an assistant professor at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, Korea following a postdoctoral position at the University of Chicago with Dr. Marc Berman. Another graduate last summer, Eliza Congdon, spent last year as a visiting assistant professor at Williams College. This fall, she started an assistant professorship at Bucknell University.

Several summer 2017 graduates are also pursuing positions in academia this year. Ivo Gyurovski is a visiting assistant professor of psychology at Hampden-Sydney College teaching introductory and social psychology courses and advising students on their theses. Dominic Gibson is a Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, where he is teaching psychology and social sciences core courses.

Postdoctoral positions continue to be a popular next step for our graduates. Last year, Courtney Filippi began a postdoctoral position with Dr. Danny Pine at the National Instititute of Child Health and Human Development, Elizabeth Necka began a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Lauren Atlas at National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at NIH, and Miriam Novack stated a postdoctoral fellowship working with Dr. Steven Franconeri at Northwestern University.  Several of this year’s graduates also chose to pursue postdoctoral positions: Hyesang Chang started a postdoctoral fellowship in the Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Lab at Stanford University with Dr. Vinod Menon. Sayuri Hayakawa began a postdoctoral position working with Dr. Viorica Marian in the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group at Northwestern University where she will both extend her graduate work on foreign languages and decision making, as well as to begin new lines of research investigating the effects of bilingualism on cognition and behavior. Keith Yoder is continuing his research as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Jean Decety at the University of Chicago, working on a project in collaboration with Dr. Kent Kiehl at the University of New Mexico that uses structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate socioemotional processing in incarcerated females.

Our graduates are also finding employment in other exciting areas. Last year, Stephen Gray parlayed his research on memory into a position as a consumer insight analyst at Facebook. Wei Wang is applying his doctoral research on color vision in his position as Senior Color and Image Quality Scientist at OmniVision Technologies. Erin Cable, who devoted a great deal of time to mentoring college students, is now advising students at Northwestern University who are interested on biology, psychology, mathematics, and health professions. Serena Klos is applying her research expertise as a data scientist at Mattersight, a SaaS (Software as Service) company that analyzes and predict customer behavior based on the language exchanged during service and sales interactions.   Another recent graduate, Jason Sattizahn, has a research and development position at Sony PlayStation, where he has been able to apply his research and experience on performance anxiety into his work on user experience while playing video games.