Description
This DC project addresses key methodological challenges in clinical and experimental psychedelic research, including expectancy and placebo effects, the breaking-blind problem, and limited mechanistic insight. The project aims to empirically evaluate methodological solutions using controlled laboratory studies and complementary naturalistic designs in healthy volunteers.
The doctoral candidate will integrate methods from cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology, combining behavioural and cognitive-experimental tasks, psychometric measures of subjective experience and expectations, and multimodal neuroimaging (EEG and fMRI), while systematically evaluating how methodological and analytical choices influence the robustness and interpretability of findings.
The project places strong emphasis on open science practices, including preregistration, transparent reporting, reproducible analysis pipelines, and open sharing of data and code. Outcomes will include empirically grounded methodological recommendations for the design, analysis, and reporting of psychedelic studies, contributing to higher rigour, reproducibility, and theoretical precision in psychedelic research.
Location
The PhD will be hosted at the Cognitive Psychology Unit at the Psychology Institute, Faculty of Social Sciences, Leiden University, The Netherlands. The research will be conducted within the PRSM lab, in collaboration with the Centre for Human Drug Research (CHDR), the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) and the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC).
Supervisors
Dr. Michiel van Elk, PhD
Michiel van Elk – Leiden University
Prof. Eiko Fried
Eiko Fried – Leiden University
Secondments
Institute: Centre for Human Drug Research (Leiden, The Netherlands)
Supervisors: Prof. dr. Geert-Jan Groeneveld, Dr. Gabriël Jacobs
Purpose: To explore clinical study design with respect to, e.g. blinding.
Institute (subject to confirmation*): European Medicines Agency (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Supervisors: subject to confirmation
Purpose: To gain experience and insight in how regulatory agencies deal with the methodological problems in clinical trials.
*EMA will be secondment host under the EMA collaborating expert programme. However, EMA cannot formally engage until the PhD student has been employed.
General eligibility criteria
- The position is open to candidates of any nationality (European and non-European) who fulfil the requirements set for the Doctoral Candidates (DCs) funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions.
- Applicants must hold a Master’s degree in a relevant academic field, allowing enrolment in a PhD program at the hiring beneficiary.
- Applicants must not previously have been awarded a PhD degree.
- Applicants must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in the country in which the DC project for which they are applying is based for more than 12 months in the 3 years prior to recruitment. This excludes short stays such as holidays, compulsory national service or time spent as part of a procedure for obtaining refugee status under the Geneva Convention.
- Applicants must be willing to undertake secondments at another institute of the network during the DC project, including at institutes in other countries.
- Applicants must be able to demonstrate their ability to understand and express themselves in both written and spoken English at a level that is sufficiently high to fully benefit from the network training (C1/C2 level).
- Applicants are expected to be motivated to work in the field of psychedelic therapy.
- Applicants are expected to work independently, well-structured and collaboratively in a multidisciplinary consortium.
Additional eligibility criteria
The ideal candidate will have:
A Master’s degree and excellent track record in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, neuroscience, biomedical sciences, computational neuroscience, psychiatry, or a related study program.
Strong analytic and statistical skills.
Strong computational and programming skills (e.g. R, Python or comparable).
Interpersonal and communication skills to effectively collaborate and communicate in academia.
Desirable qualifications and interests:
Experience with neuroimaging methods (EEG and/or fMRI) or advanced psychophysiological techniques.
Experience with using open science practices (e.g., data and code sharing).
Being able to work independently and collaboratively in a multidisciplinary research environment.
This DC10 PhD will be part of the 3-year EU-funded MSCA DN INTEGRATE project. Additional funding is available to extend the PhD project with a 4th year at Leiden University.