Human-Centered AI Intern, Behavioral Science

Overview

At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we’re on a mission to improve the quality of human life. We’re developing new tools and capabilities to amplify the human experience. To lead this transformative shift in mobility, we’ve built a world-class team advancing the state of the art in AI, robotics, driving, and material sciences.

This is a Summer 2026 paid 12-week internship opportunity. The role is hybrid in-office. We welcome applicants from fields such as psychology, organizational behavior, sociology, behavioral economics, human factors, computational social sciences, or related disciplines, provided they have strong methodological training and interest in collective wellbeing.

This internship opportunity falls within the Harmonious Communities Department in the Human-Centered AI Division (HCAI). Our research aims to understand, simulate, and shape wellbeing in complex, real-world systems, including workplaces, communities, and organizations. In addition to examining individual behavior, we study how wellbeing emerges, is distributed, and changes over time across groups, and how organizational structures, technologies, and policies can support collective outcomes.

We are an integrated team of behavioral scientists, machine-learning researchers, and human-computer interaction experts. Our Behavioral Scientists bridge human-centered research with the next generation of Toyota products and strategy.

We are looking for a Behavioral Science intern to help advance a research-driven wellbeing framework with direct relevance to organizational decision-making. This internship is well-suited for candidates who are excited by questions such as:

• What does collective wellbeing mean, and how is it related to (but not reducible to) individual wellbeing?
• How does wellbeing change over time in response to organizational structures, policies, or interventions?
• How can wellbeing be measured rigorously in real-world, imperfect settings?

The project will involve conceptual work, measurement design, and quantitative analysis, with an emphasis on multilevel thinking. Over the course of the project, in addition to Harmonious Communities group meetings, you will also participate in all Human-Centered AI Division meetings. You will be exposed to how interdisciplinary industrial research works and learn from our team and the other interns in our division.

Furthermore, you will engage in strategy discussions about how your internship research project connects to business impact at Toyota.

• Scope a research project to align with our Harmonious Communities Behavioral Science efforts.
• Examine how collective wellbeing relates to individual-level wellbeing, including issues of aggregation, inequality, and shared context.
• Be the primary driver of the technical plan (e.g., study design, analysis plan) with regular feedback from your mentor and teammates.
• Implement and complete the project using TRI resources.
• Present the project's approach and findings in research meetings to the Harmonious Communities Department, the HCAI Division, and TRI, as well as to partners from Toyota business groups.
• Our goal is that you end the summer with work that informs internal strategy and may be publishable in an academic journal or conference.

• Enrolled in a PhD degree program.
• Track record of implementing research projects from start-to-finish.
• Experience with or strong interest in longitudinal, multilevel, or time-series modeling (e.g., growth models, mixed-effects models, panel data, or related approaches).
• Ability to reason across multiple levels of analysis and translate research insights into implications for organizational decision-making.
• Interest in theory development or integrative modeling.
• Comfort working with imperfect, real-world data and balancing rigor with practical constraints.
• Desire to work on challenging, open-ended research projects.
• Desire to be part of a highly interdisciplinary team, and an understanding of how this will improve your work.
• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously while soliciting feedback.
• Interest in the topic space of wellbeing,…