Open Postdoc position

Aug 2020

We are hiring! We are looking for an enthusiastic Postdoctoral Researcher to lead the mouse work of the Zero-Noise Lab at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience.

The Lab

The Zero-Noise Lab investigates how neuronal population activity unfolds in real time during naturalistic behaviour - and how such activity can simultaneously encode multiple ongoing cognitive processes like learning, attention, and perceptual decision making. What’s more, we want to compare this in the two dominant model species of systems neuroscience: mouse and monkey. To this end, we conduct chronic electrophysiological recordings in the visual cortex of macaques and mice, while they are engaged in the same, naturalistic foraging task in a virtual environment. We are no fans of cross-trial averaging - we believe that if the brain only gets one shot at making sense of its own activity, so should we.

The lab is jointly headed by Marieke Schölvinck and Martha Nari Havenith, and funded by the Max Planck Society. We aim to build the lab as a highly collaborative environment, where postdocs and PhD students focus on experiments in either mouse or monkey, but intensely work together to ensure that we constantly align and mutually learn from experiments across species. We are now looking for a postdoc to lead the mouse side of the lab, while developing their own ideas and research interests.

The Institute

The Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience is a dynamic research institute with a focus on primate research, located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It hosts several groups that work on various aspects of neuronal population dynamics, and use a range of methodologies including electrophysiology in macaques, marmosets, mice, and rats, MEG and fMRI in humans, and modelling work. The institute is very international; the working language is English. Frankfurt is a vibrant and international city that is well connected to the rest of Germany and Europe.

You

If you hold (or are about to hold) a Ph.D., have experience with electrophysiological recordings in awake animals, and are eager to work in an interdisciplinary lab with multiple model species, we would love to hear from you! Additional skills that would be extremely valuable:

• Experience with electrophysiological recordings in awake animals
• Programming skills (Matlab and/or Python)
• Technical skills to build up an electrophysiology set-up
• Experience with behavioural training

Appointment & Starting date

Ideally, we would like you to start in winter 2020. The appointment is for three years initially, with the possibility of extension by another two years; the salary is in accordance with the regulations for academic personnel.

How to apply

If you’re interested, please send an email to Marieke and Martha before September 30th, 2019. In your email, please explain your background, what you expect from your postdoc, and why you want to join us in Frankfurt (including non-scientific reasons, if any – we like to get to know the human beings we work with!). The application remains open until the position is filled. We look forward to hearing from you!