Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in AI Metacognition and Reasoning
Wisdom & Culture Lab, University of Waterloo
How can advanced AI systems better recognize when their reasoning may be wrong, their confidence is unwarranted, or further reflection is needed?
The Wisdom & Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo, directed by Professor Igor Grossmann, is seeking a postdoctoral fellow for a new interdisciplinary research program on metacognition in advanced AI systems.
The project sits at the intersection of AI, metacognition, reasoning, forecasting, and decision science. We are interested in pushing the field beyond whether AI systems can generate accurate answers, toward whether and how to monitor and regulate their inferences when evidence is incomplete and uncertainty is substantial.
The work builds on emerging research on machine metacognition and wise reasoning and will combine contemporary language models with insights from cognitive science, forecasting, and uncertainty-aware decision making. The project is designed to produce both fundamental scientific contributions and reusable research infrastructure.
The fellow will lead computational research using frontier and open-source language models, develop rigorous evaluations of reasoning under uncertainty, and help shape a broader research program on machine metacognition. The position includes research-engineering support and substantial scope for intellectual ownership (Waterloo policies allow scientists to retain copyright), publications, open-source research, and related independent work.
Responsibilities
-
Lead computational research on metacognition and reasoning in advanced AI systems
-
Develop new experimental paradigms, benchmarks, and evaluation approaches
-
Design and run large-scale experiments across different language models and model families
-
Explore approaches for improving how models select and use reasoning strategies.
-
Build reproducible computational research pipelines
-
Lead and co-author papers, conference submissions, and open-source research outputs
-
Collaborate with researchers and trainees spanning AI, psychology, forecasting, and computational social science
Qualifications
Applicants should have completed, or expect to complete before starting, a PhD in computer science, natural language processing, computational linguistics, machine learning, computational cognitive science, computational social science, HCI, quantitative psychology, or a related field.
Competitive candidates will have several of the following:
-
Strong Python programming skills
-
Experience working with contemporary LLMs, through APIs and/or open-weight models
-
Experience with AI evaluation, benchmarking, computational experimentation, or model comparison
-
Strong quantitative and statistical skills
-
Familiarity with contemporary methods for adapting, training, or orchestrating language models
-
Experience with robustness testing, ablation studies, or reproducible computational research.
-
Interest in metacognition, reasoning, uncertainty, forecasting, AI evaluation/safety, or decision science
-
Strong scientific writing skills
Expertise in every area above is not required. Exceptional computational researchers interested in the underlying scientific questions are encouraged to apply even without a traditional psychology or forecasting background.
Employment details
-
Full-time postdoctoral fellowship, initially 12 months with anticipated renewal for a second year, subject to funding and satisfactory performance.
-
Based at the University of Waterloo; hybrid arrangements may be possible with regular interaction with the Waterloo research team.
-
Salary CAD $65,000-$70,000/year + benefits
-
Start date: immediately/Winter-Spring 2027, with some flexibility.
Application
Please submit a cover letter, CV, 2-3 page research statement, up to three representative publications/preprints, and contact information for three referees.
In your cover letter, briefly describe an AI evaluation or modeling problem where an apparently sensible performance metric could lead to a misleading conclusion, and how you would investigate it.
Applications will be reviewed beginning Oct 15 and continue until the position is filled.
Send materials to waclab@uwaterloo.ca, subject line: AI Metacognition Postdoc.
Questions: Igor Grossmann, igrossma@uwaterloo.ca