JOPRO is accepting proposals for research positions and other opportunities running for the 2026-2027 academic year. All positions are remote, run twelve to fourteen weeks, and carry the option to continue on the project afterward. They are open to graduate students, postgraduate and early career researchers, and undergraduates prepared to work at that level.

A change for this cycle is in how applications work: select projects now have a proposal requirement.

As an institutional note: we do not use AI in our evaluation process.

New opportunities and calls for Fall 2026

Four research positions are live across our working groups and the forthcoming Center for Futures Studies.

Between them they cover:

• whether claims about agency and cognition still hold once they are moved off the systems they were built on (substrate agnostic agency studies);

• the history of how psychiatry, psychology, and clinical mental health came to define what they study, and what was closed off over their establishment;

• multiple projects on machine behavior and AI Agents, including how to tell whether a language model reasons morally or only produces output that reads that way;

• and how the current system of scientific publishing came about, from the commercialization of journals through the rise of citation metrics to the consolidation of the industry into a few large firms.

Additional postings and collaborations will be made public throughout the month.

Those opportunities include a developing interest group on accessibility and assistive technology, as well as forthcoming role within a project on emergent behavior and boundary/convention transgressions by AI agents as spearheaded by Data x Direction research intern .

News around the JOPRO Community

The JOPRO Futures Center

The JOPRO Center for Futures Studies launches this fall as a living lab for use-inspired research in futures studies, philosophy, metascience, and strategy and systemic change.

Its pre-launch site is live at futures.jopro.org, covering the Center’s approach, its active work on FrontierMap and the Field Guide to the Futures Ecosystem, and the four initiatives building its first full operating year: foundational papers and theory of change work, an essay contest on overlooked on-ramps to desirable futures, a micro-residency cohort of two or three people, and a 2026 conference.

The call for partners and advisors is open now, as is the cohort interest list.

From our network and alumni

Karina Zambani, a research intern with Data x Direction and the Society, Ethics & Technology group, now serves on the University of California AI Steering Committee, which works alongside the UC AI Council on responsible AI across the ten-campus system. She is an undergraduate at UC San Diego studying data science and philosophy, and one of two students on a committee otherwise composed of chancellors, deans, system CIOs, and national laboratory directors.

Zambani also addressed the 2026 Data x Direction Summer Cohort on early career strategy and other aspects of technology, education, and vocation earlier this year.

Also from Data x Direction, is finishing her PhD work on accessibility at Technological University Dublin. She published “Active inclusion in the real world” this month. The argument, in paraphrase: AI ethics guidelines converge on fairness, accountability, and transparency while leaving those principles weakly actionable, and the alternative is to build inclusion into the AI lifecycle itself, across data governance, problem framing, evaluation criteria, deployment constraints, and monitoring after release.

Makati works through Hagendorff’s review of the guidelines, Selbst and colleagues’ argument that fairness cannot be added to a model once it has been built, and the documentation practices established by datasheets for datasets and model cards.

Earlier this year, we aggregated numerous strands of discussion concerning Human-AI relations. Cutting across multiple working groups, programs, and organizations, we look forward to continue many of these discussions in the opportunities listed above.

More updates from the 2026 Data x Direction Summer Cohort will be released in a forthcoming email.

Fall Programming Preview

Several discussion series will be continuing, including the Modernizing Mental Health and DigiNEST (Digital Narratives and Emerging Story Technologies) events.

New this fall:

• DigiNEST Studio & Workshop Days. In addition to the public-facing discussions series, a new set of sessions has emerged where digital creators, software and app makers, creatives, and other technology-makers meet to discuss their projects. This builds upon JOPRO’s existing incubation efforts and is in response to our growing community of practice.

• Lecture-Lab Combined Program. In partnership with Orthogonal Research and Education Laboratory, we are extending the Cognition Futures Reading Group & Cybernetics Interest Group into a paired sequence of weekly discussion sessions followed by lab/implementation sessions.

• Shop Talk: Directing Research Programs, a new series for those directing, designing, and developing organizations and research programs. Building upon past efforts such as ’s “Management and Leadership: On Navigation for Research + Innovation”, ’s coursework on Open Source Project management, and “JOPRO & the New Learning Ecosystem”, the series will explore key elements of cultivating spaces to do innovative, multi-disciplinary investigations.

If you are interested in exploring these opportunities, please reach out. Don’t see it? Pitch a role: if you have an idea for how you could collaborate or contribute to JOPRO’s mission, we want to hear it. Send a brief description of the role you’d create and what you’d bring to it to Start [at] JOPRO dot org.

Fall 2026 Incubation Open Period has closed

JOPRO is no longer accepting Fall 2026 incubation proposals.

Thank you to all who have engaged us with interest this year! We are processing materials and will announce accepted projects throughout the fall term.

Celebrating an unprecedented summer!

Thanks to all who have made the summer unlike any other in JOPRO’s history! In our broader community, we had programming six days a week across the Joint Open Source Summer Cohort, Data x Direction, Google Summer of Code (Orthogonal Research and Education Lab & DevoWorm), DigiNEST, Cognition Futures, and more.

We will be hosting in-person events in the Boston/Cambridge area, New York, and potentially California later this year as well. To participate in our public events, follow the JOPRO Luma Calendar.

For more information and updates about programming and future opportunities, please subscribe to our updates below.

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JOPRO is accepting applications for its summer 2026 internship and research cohort programming. Positions span the organization’s three working groups and its partner programs — from open-source research infrastructure and data ethics to complexity science, cognitive sovereignty, and philosophy of science.

All positions are remote. Most run 10 to 12 weeks. Applications are rolling.

Highlighted Positions

Open Source Summer Cohort

Partner Programs / OREL

The Orthogonal Research and Education Laboratory (OREL) has hosted Google Summer of Code cohorts since 2017, with nearly 25 contributors completing the program under the mentorship of Dr. Bradly Alicea and colleagues.

The Open Source Summer Cohort runs alongside GSoC each summer, giving participants access to the same mentorship network, discussion group, and professional development programming as GSoC contributors — working on open-source projects in data science and AI, research infrastructure, computational biology, among other topics.

For undergraduate or graduate students with software development experience and interest in open-source research tools, neuroscience, or computational modeling. International applicants welcome.

Read the full posting →

Note: Full Google-Funded GSoC Contributors will be announced tomorrow by Orthogonal Lab and International Neuroinformatics Coordination Facility (INCF)

Data Ethics & Responsible AI Research Intern

Society Ethics Tech / Data x Direction

Data x Direction bridges data science, ethics, human-centered AI, and interdisciplinary leadership. Interns select a focus track (Technical or Policy & Communication), identify a research topic in consultation with the Project Lead, and produce a final deliverable suitable for a portfolio or publication.

For undergraduate or graduate students with strong writing skills and familiarity with core data science concepts.

Read the full posting →

New: Complexity Science Research Intern

Cognition Futures / Center for Future Studies

This newly announced position investigates the emerging convergence between David Krakauer’s institutional framing of complexity science and Michael Levin’s experimental vocabulary for agency, intelligence, and teleonomic matter. The intern will produce a structured comparative analysis of where these two research programs converge, where they diverge, and what the divergence reveals about the current state of the field.

The project connects to JOPRO’s philosophy of science work and its broader investigation of how fields negotiate paradigmatic commitments in real time.

For graduate students or advanced undergraduates in philosophy of science, cognitive science, complex systems, computational biology, or STS.

Read the full posting →

AI for Human Flourishing: Preserving Agency and Cognitive Sovereignty

Society Ethics Tech

AI systems are increasingly embedded in the environments where people think, decide, and form beliefs. This internship investigates what happens to human agency when AI mediates cognition at scale — surveying research on persuasion, sycophancy, epistemic dependence, and reflective capacity, and examining what design responses exist to preserve cognitive sovereignty.

The intern will produce a structured review or working paper draft and engage with JOPRO’s DigiNEST and Data x Direction teams where relevant.

For undergraduate or graduate students in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, epistemology, HCI, psychology, or STS.

Read the full posting →

Philosophy of Science Research Intern

Futures Center / Kuhn Update Project

Does Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions still describe how fields actually develop? This internship contributes to a research project examining whether classical frameworks of scientific change hold under contemporary conditions: accelerating discovery cycles, institutional pressure on research, and the blurring of disciplinary boundaries.

The intern will contribute to literature review and help develop the argument for one paper in the series, engaging with Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and more recent theorists. Part of JOPRO’s Foundation of Alternatives research.

For graduate students in philosophy of science, history of science, STS, or sociology of knowledge.

Read the full posting →

Full Summer Opportunities Now Launched

JOPRO and its partner organizations have many additional openings this summer, including positions in digital narratives and epistemic agency, futures ecosystem mapping, diverse intelligences research, deliberative methodology, communications, and a Field Stewards fellowship. See all current openings at opportunities.jopro.org.

We appreciate the enthusiastic applicants who have already reached out! Interviews have begun this week, and we will reply and offer scheduling for next steps as soon as is tenable.

How to Apply

Each posting includes an application form. You can also email “start [at] jopro.org” with your statement of interest and CV.

If none of the listed positions fit but you see a way to contribute, JOPRO accepts pitched roles: describe the position you would create and what you would bring to it.

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