Research Scientist, Multiregional Electrophysiology of Rodent Cognition

The role

You will use large-scale neural recordings to investigate how the brain builds and uses an internal model of the world in mice. This end-to-end experimental role involves task design, surgery, Neuropixels recording, perturbation, and large-scale neural data analysis.

What you will do

• Define cognitive processes and experimental questions in mice.
• Design and iterate head-fixed behavioral paradigms.
• Perform high-density, multiregional electrophysiology using Neuropixels.
• Combine electrophysiology with two-photon imaging and holographic photostimulation.
• Lead computational analysis of large-scale neural population data.
• Set viral and transgenic expression strategy.
• Perform mouse survival surgery including stereotaxic viral injection and headbar installation.
• Mentor research associates, technicians, and junior scientists.
• Contribute to publications, talks, open data, and tooling releases.

Required qualifications

• PhD with 0–4 years of experience in neuroscience, bioengineering, physics, or a related field, or equivalent research experience.
• Hands-on mouse survival surgery experience: stereotaxic injections, headbars, chronic cranial windows, and craniotomies.
• Hands-on experience with in vivo extracellular electrophysiology in awake, behaving rodents, including high-density silicon probes (Neuropixels).
• Proficiency in scientific computing for neural-data analysis, in Python and/or MATLAB, with Kilosort, SpikeGLX, or comparable pipelines.
• Experience training head-fixed rodents on behavioral tasks.

Nice to have

• Experience combining electrophysiology with optical methods: two-photon calcium imaging, optogenetics, or SLM-based holographic photostimulation.
• Experience with multi-area or brain-wide recording and analyses of inter-areal interactions and effective connectivity.
• Prior systems neuroscience research on cognition, including working memory, decision-making, perception, or motor/premotor circuits.
• Familiarity with viral tools and transgenic mouse lines for targeted recording and manipulation, including soma-targeted opsins such as ChRmine.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package
• Total compensation that is competitive and commensurate with the level of experience and qualifications

About the company

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. Astera Neuro seeks to understand and engineer consciousness by combining large-scale neural recording, causal perturbation, and brain-based AI.