Research Scientist / Engineer, Functional Ultrasound Imaging

The role

You will develop a volumetric functional ultrasound imaging platform for primates by working across hardware, experimentation, and computational analysis. This involves building imaging systems, designing experiments, and analyzing large-scale datasets to create brain atlases.

What you will do

• Build, validate, and optimize a large-scale volumetric functional ultrasound imaging platform for awake, behaving primates.
• Design and execute multimodal neuroscience experiments combining fUSI with behavioral paradigms and complementary recording and perturbation techniques.
• Develop robust computational pipelines for image reconstruction, preprocessing, registration, quality control, statistical analysis, and visualization.
• Analyze large-scale functional imaging datasets using modern statistical and machine learning approaches.
• Register imaging data across sessions and animals to generate high-resolution anatomical and functional brain atlases.
• Integrate fUSI with electrophysiology and other neural recording and perturbation modalities.
• Collaborate closely with engineers and software developers to improve imaging hardware and acquisition software.
• Mentor research technicians and, at senior or principal levels, more junior scientists and engineers.
• Publish scientific discoveries using Open Science and FAIR principles.
• Contribute to open datasets, software, and technical documentation.

Required qualifications

• Experience with in vivo functional ultrasound imaging, or with comparable high-resolution neuro imaging technologies.
• Experience designing and executing neuroscience experiments in primates, including awake macaque fMRI.
• Strong scientific programming skills in Python and/or MATLAB.
• Understanding of primate neuroanatomy, image registration, and atlas construction.
• Experience with image reconstruction and signal processing.
• Experience analyzing large-scale imaging, electrophysiology, or multimodal neuroscience datasets, including with machine learning or computational neuroscience methods.
• Ability to work at close quarters with software engineers, hardware engineers, and neuroscientists in a fast-moving, multi-team environment.
• Track record of mentorship and technical leadership.

Nice to have

• PhD with 4-12+ years of experience in neuroscience, bioengineering, physics, electrical engineering, or a related field
• Equivalent demonstrated expertise

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.