I’m moving to Austin!

The title pretty much says it. After spending four great years in Colorado, I’m happy to say that I’ll be moving to Austin at the end of the month. I’ll be joining the Department of Psychology at UT-Austin as a Research Associate, where I plan to continue dabbling in all things psychological and informatic, but with less snow and more air conditioning.

While my new position nominally has the same title as my old one, the new one’s a bit unusual in that the funding is coming from two quite different sources. Half of it comes from my existing NIH grant for development of the Neurosynth framework, which means that half of my time will be spent more or less the same way I’m spending it now–namely, on building tools to improve and automate the large-scale synthesis of functional MRI data. (Incidentally, I’ll be hiring a software developer and/or postdoc in the very near future, so drop me a line if you think you might be interested.)

The other half of the funding is tied to the PsyHorns course developed by Jamie Pennebaker and Sam Gosling over the past few years. PsyHorns is a synchronous massive online course (SMOC) that lets anyone in the world with an internet connection (okay, and $550 in loose change lying around) take an introductory psychology class via the internet and officially receive credit for it from the University of Texas (this recent WSJ article on PsyHorns provides some more details). My role will be to serve as a bridge between the psychologists and the developers–which means I’ll have an eclectic assortment of duties like writing algorithms to detect cheating, developing tools to predict how well people are doing in the class, mining the gigantic reams of data we’re acquiring, developing ideas for new course features, and, of course, publishing papers.

Naturally, the PILab will be joining me in my southern adventure. Since the PILab currently only has one permanent member (guess who?), and otherwise consists of a single Mac Pro workstation, this latter move involves much less effort than you might think (though it does mean I’ll have to change the lab website’s URL, logo, and–horror of horrors–color scheme). Unfortunately, all the wonderful people of the PILab will be staying behind, as they all have various much more important ties to Boulder (by which I mean that I’m not actually currently paying any of their salaries, and none of them were willing to subsist on the stipend of baked beans, love, and high-speed internet I offered them).

While I’m super excited about moving to Austin, I’m not at all excited to leave Colorado. Boulder is a wonderful place to live*–it’s sunny all the time, has a compact, walkable core, a surprising amount of stuff to do, and these gigantic mountain things you can walk all over. My wife and I have made many incredible friends here, and after four years in Colorado, it’s come to feel very much like home. So leaving will be difficult. Still, I’m excited to move onto new things. As great as the past four years have been, a number of factors precipitated this move:

• The research fit is better. This isn’t in any way a knock against the environment here at Colorado, which has been great (hey, they’re hiring! If you do computational cognitive neuroscience, you should apply!). I had great colleagues here who work on some really interesting questions–particularly Tor Wager, my postdoc advisor for my first 3 years here, who’s an exceptional scientist and stellar human being. But every department necessarily has to focus on some areas at the expense of others, and much of the research I do (or would ideally like to do) wasn’t well-represented here. In particular, my interests in personality and individual differences have languished during my time in Boulder, as I’ve had trouble finding collaborators for most of the project ideas I’ve had. UT-Austin, by contrast, has one of the premier personality and individual differences groups anywhere. I’m delighted to be working a few doors down from people like Sam Gosling, Jamie Pennebaker, Elliot Tucker-Drob, and David Buss. On top of that, UT-Austin still has major strengths in most of my other areas of interest, most notably neuroimaging (I expect to continue to collaborate frequently with Russ Poldrack) and data mining (a world-class CS department with an expanding focus on Big Data). So, purely in terms of fit, it’s hard for me to imagine a better place than UT.
• I’m excited to work on a project with immediate real-world impact. While I’d love to believe that most of the work I currently do is making the world better in some very small way, the reality most scientists engaged in basic research face is that at the end of the day, we don’t actually know what impact we’re having. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, mind you; as a general rule, I’m a big believer in the idea of doing science just because it’s interesting and exciting, without worrying about the consequences (or lack thereof). You know, knowledge for it’s own sake and all that. Still, on a personal level, I find myself increasingly wanting to do something that I feel confers some clear and measurable benefit on the world right now–however small. In that respect, online education strikes me as an excellent area to pour my energy into. And PsyHorns is a particularly unusual (and, to my mind, promising) experiment in online education. The preliminary data from previous iterations of the course suggests that students who take the course synchronously online do better academically–not just in this particular class (as compared to an in-class section), but in other courses as well. While I’m not hugely optimistic about the malleability of the human mind as a general rule–meaning, I don’t think there are as-yet undiscovered teaching approaches that are going to radically improve the learning experience–I do believe strongly in the cumulative impact of many small nudging in the right direction. I think this is the right platform for that kind of nudging.
• Data. Lots and lots of data. Enrollment in PsyHorns this year is about 1,500 students, and previous iterations have seen comparable numbers. As part of their introduction to psychology, the students engage in a wide range of activities: they have group chats about the material they’re learning; they write essays about a range of topics; they fill out questionnaires and attitude surveys; and, for the first time this year, they use a mobile app that assesses various aspects of their daily experience. Aside from the feedback we provide to the students (some of which is potentially actionable right away), the data we’re collecting provides a unique opportunity to address many questions at the intersection of personality and individual differences, health and subjective well-being, and education. It’s not Big Data by, say, Google or Amazon standards (we’re talking thousands of rows rather than billions), but it’s a dataset with few parallels in psychology, and I’m thrilled to be able to work on it.
• I like doing research more than I like teaching** or doing service work. Like my current position, the position I’m assuming at UT-Austin is 100% research-focused, with very little administrative or teaching overhead. Obviously, it doesn’t have the long-term security of a tenure-track position, but I’m okay with that. I’m still selectively applying for tenure-track positions (and turned one down this year in favor of the UT position), so it’s not as though I have any principled objections to the tenure stream. But short of a really amazing opportunity, I’m very happy with my current arrangement.
• 
  Austin seems like a pretty awesome place to live. Boulder is too, but after four years of living in a relatively small place (population: ~100,000), my wife and I are looking forward to living somewhere more city-like. We’ve opted to take the (expensive) plunge and live downtown–where we’ll be within walking distance of just about everything we need. By which of course I mean the chocolate fountain at the Whole Foods mothership.
• The tech community in Austin is booming. Given that most of my work these days lies at the interface of psychology and informatics, and there are unprecedented opportunities for psychology-related data mining in industry these days, I’m hoping to develop better collaborations with people in industry–at both startups and established companies. While I have no intention of leaving academia in the near future, I do think psychologists have collectively failed to take advantage of the many opportunities to collaborate with folks in industry on interesting questions about human behavior–often at an unprecedented scale. I’ve done a terrible job of that myself, and fixing that is near the top of my agenda. So, hey, if you work at a tech company in Austin and have some data lying around that you think might shed new insights on what people feel, think, and do, let’s chat!
• I guess sometimes you just get the itch to move onto something new. For me, this is that.

* Okay, it was an amazing place to live until the massive floods this past week rearranged rivers, roads, and lives. My wife and I  were fortunate enough to escape any personal or material damage, but many others were not so lucky. If you’d like to help, please consider making a donation.

** Actually, I love teaching. What I don’t love is all the stuff surrounding teaching.